


Take a good swing at all my dreams

by apiphile



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: AU, Awkward Sex, Boxing & Fisticuffs, F/M, M/M, New York, Other, affection expressed through violence, arthur is a robot serial killer, author knows a surprising amount about boxing, author knows nothing about New York, author knows very little about architecture, criminals, dom!ariadne, eames is fat, i_reversebang, it's not actually a good idea to shag your boss, look at all my tags, organised crime, reversebang challenge, screw your fanon the man is not a sex ninja, too much description
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-10
Updated: 2011-04-10
Packaged: 2017-10-17 21:14:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/181231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Disqualified amateur boxer and architecture grad student Ariadne is preparing for her first fight as an illegal pro, and<br/>encountering all kinds of unpleasant (and slightly happier) secrets and obstacles as the fight draws nearer.</p><p>[Entry for i_reversebang]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take a good swing at all my dreams

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Stan Littlecake](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Stan+Littlecake).



> Thanks to my betas/American-pickers Amy K, Tabby P, my artist (& dear friend) Stan Littlecake for sending me research materials from boxing books, Kieron Gillen for hand-holding me through one of the scenes, and the wide variety of Americans responding promptly on Twitter to my bellowed queries about details of US culture and language.
> 
> All additional artwork is by Stan.

The basement rooms are cold even in summer, but within five minutes of the end of warm-up – five minutes of real sparring – Ariadne is grateful for those supernaturally chilled conditions. The trick is to come in bundled-up as if she’s taking a train through Siberia, shed the layers of wool and cotton one by one in a bizarre strip-tease as she does each successive exercise, and get her heart pumping, and to pretend she can’t see Eames’s eyes widen just a little with every garment that ends up on the back of the old school chair.

The basement rooms once contained posters for legends of the ring, stylish and stylised interpretations of women wielding gloves, often impractically adorned with diamond or pearl necklaces. It’s a code, Eames told her when she first started training with him (with Arthur): diamonds are the hard hitters, pearls are the girls who peak fast and fade the same way. Now there are just shreds of dry fire-hazard paper adhering in torn strata to the bare, damp bricks.

Ariadne bends and twists, jogs on the spot, discards her hat and gloves as her circulation improves with the movement. Opposite her place there used to be a full-body poster of her heroine, her inspiration, but that got pulled down when the woman died.

She does jumping jacks.

You have to take risks. You can’t let death weigh you down like an anchor or the minute the cemeteries first opened no one would do a damn thing. Arthur told her that. She suspects the comments weren’t aimed so much at her as past her.

The room stays cold but she warms up.

The last clinging fragments of the woman whose legend led Ariadne to put on gloves for the first time as a scrawny, furious fifteen-year-old still just about outline her memory on the wall opposite.

"Ready to brutalise some innocent sand?" Eames says, from behind her. The basement echoes badly enough that 'behind her' is a triumph of directional hearing, and she can't do better than that. And besides, the door to the freezing, damp, urine-scented closet that passes for a bathroom down here is behind her. It doesn't take a genius to figure out where he's materialized from. "Or does the floor need to take a little more punishment first?"

She ignores him and returns to half-turns, to twists and reaches.

"Ah, silly of me, you're still wearing the sweater. It is obviously _not_ sparring time yet." Eames thumps down behind her. Ariadne pretends she can hear the creak of his bones. "Although I assume you're aware that what with only having two more days before you have to turn a nice young lady into burger meat you should really be spending a little more time aggressively walloping hanging bags of –"

Ariadne turns fully, foot behind foot, the perfect excuse to practice. "I'm aware that _Arthur_ is coaching me, not you."

Sometimes she forgets, sometimes she lets words fly out as hard as fists, causing the same damage to the same observed weak spots. Eames flashes her a casual, snapped-back smile and nods his agreement. It's about forty degrees down here, and he's slightly shiny with sweat on his face all the same; the crows' feet at the corners of his eyes look hurt in some way that's beyond his control, and Ariadne swears at herself internally.

"Well you know I would _love_ to be out there handing out fliers," he says, and there's a fractionally more _British_ accent in his already British accent, the kind she associates with black-and-white movies and cut glassware, the kind Jon Stewart makes fun of whenever John Oliver's talking to him. "But we have illegally-underpaid fifteen-year-olds to do that for us, and I can't call any bookies at –" Eames makes a feint toward a wrist that does not currently bear the pretend Rolex nor even the red plastic Disney watch she saw him wear once, and then fishes out a very battered-looking old-model European cell phone and frowns, "– this early."

Eames smiles at her, a watered-down version of the _go fuck yourself, Arthur_ smile that he uses when they argue in her presence. It's not the first time she's been on the receiving end of this one, but it's still oddly like being bitten by a docile spaniel.

"Where is Arthur, anyway?" he asks, even though he's clearly been here longer than her and the basement isn't exactly teeming with places for Arthur to hide in.

It's a rhetorical question. She gives him a shrug as an answer and begins shadowboxing. A few more minutes, she thinks, and she'll be able to take off her sweater and then she'll be ready to bind her hands and get to work on the heavy bag. She's saving the speed bag for later, in part because she's not awake enough yet, but mostly because it needs re-inflating.

"Well, in the absence of your diligent coach and with the likelihood that he is busy sucking someone's cock – concentrate, Ariadne, you're going to be hearing worse than that in the ring – I suppose it's down to me to make sure you get through your regime properly today." Eames puts his hands behind his head and leans against the wall, the ex-school bench doing itself proud in not buckling under the weight of both an out-of-shape Englishman and a metric fuckton of unsaid things.

"Do you have to do that?" she mutters, counting punches in the air, bobbing back from no one, ducking and twisting. The muscles in her stomach burn in the kind of hot happiness of what her father used to called _honest work_ , when he was still allowed to climb ladders and nail things.

"Saw that one coming," Eames comments, his eyes half-shut. "You telegraphed it rather badly. Next time you might as well take an advert out on the subway."

"Can you at least keep your domestic troubles to yourself?" she half-grunts under her breath. _Fifty-nine, sixty_.

It's a hit too hard, again, and when she glances sideways his eyes are open and his mouth is set in a smile she knows isn't any more genuine than his Rolex or his history. She knows the "domestic" side of the troubles had passed long before she moved from 'college amateur' to 'slightly dodgy pro', into their sphere, and that it's still a below-the-belt blow, but she finds her sparring with Eames is rarely purely physical, and she can never quite put to one side the striking urge to hurt him.

"Time for the heavy bag," Eames decides, getting to his feet to hold it for her. He is wearing a dark grey shirt with neon orange and pastel yellow plaid overlaid in faint and bright squares. She is fascinated that anyone has ever made a shirt so ugly, almost enough to ask where he found it.

"Oh, you're my mother now?" Ariadne asks instead, pulling bindings from her bag - they smell of dried sweat - and wrapping her hands with speed and delicacy, the way, she's told, that she hits. The heavy bag is _important_ ; speed is not her problem.

"Doesn't she think you're a stripper?"

"She'd prefer it if I was," Ariadne says, only half-joking. Most people's mothers might be relieved their only child was paying her way through post-grad with healthy exercise instead of taking her clothes off in front of strangers, but Mrs Shaw has heard about deaths in the ring.

 _Too many people die boxing. You'd practically be safer stripping,_ and no amount of reason, statistics, or patiently-worded emails from her sociologist room mate will shift her mother's erroneous belief.

Ariadne strips the sweater and t-shirt, and nearly takes her tank with it. Tough shit for Eames, who will just have to live with the flash of _things that live under rocks_ -tan that constitutes the skin of her stomach. He is holding the heavy bag as if both it and he are structurally-vital components of the building above and she snorts to herself as she gives her shoulders a final, unnecessary roll.

Eames is a strange mixture of comfortingly solid and grotesquely unstable; he holds the bag as if she's barely touching it, which infuriates her, but she knows his knees are the stuff of orthopedic nightmares and that a simple knock to the side of one could cripple him for a week.

"Were you planning on punching the bag, Miss Shaw, or do you intend to just stand there and fondle it like a schoolgirl's tits all morning?" Eames asks, from around the cylinder of red leather.

Ariadne gives another short straight-punch to the heavy bag again, feeling warmth in her cheeks as well as in her shoulder and down the length of her arm, where it belongs.

She's willing to bet that the grotesque instability extends to the inside of his head, too, but that doesn't stop her from saying, "If this is how you think you touch another human being, it's no wonder he left you."

The bag remains steady as she hits it again, clinically this time, but she knows she might as well have punched him in the balls.

He doesn't answer her. Ariadne knows, and he knows she knows, and so on, that it was Eames who terminated the non-professional side of their partnership, which he's told her before – with a brittle cheerfulness – _almost amounts to a suicide attempt, with Arthur_. And for all she knows, he likes being punched in the balls.

Ariadne stops thinking about punching Eames in the balls and hits the heavy bag again. As she makes contact, the door to the basement squeals open and screeches shut as she withdraws; as she readies her already-aching shoulder for another shot, the door bangs, and Eames says, "What happened to military-grade punctuality, Robot?"

"I will take over now, thank you, Eames," Arthur says, as still and Zen as an unruffled lake, the kind which is mirror-smooth and surrounded by swans or something.

Ariadne steps back from the heavy bag and rotates her shoulders again as Arthur puts his hands on the heavy bag in a completely different position to Eames's, and Eames gets out of his way with a tight-lipped smile that's almost identical to Arthur's. Apart from the electric atmosphere in the basement, there are several things she can't really be sure of: whether Arthur's gripping differently because Eames was holding the bag wrong, or because he doesn't want to put his hands near Eames, still; whether the tight-lipped smile is the same as Arthur's because they used to be … or because he's, because Eames is trying to make fun of him.

 _Concentrate, Ariadne_. Christ, someone would need to throw vitriol in her eyes for there to be anything this distracting at the actual fight.

"Ready?" she asks Arthur as Eames slinks away from the heavy bag and flops back onto his spot on the bench.

Arthur nods minutely, and she hits again.

Things _might_ go easier, or at least a little less tense, if Eames would just get out and buy himself a coffee or a beer or a newspaper – maybe not a newspaper, Ariadne thinks, remembering Arthur's sarcastic comments about her manager's literacy – and reduce some of the near-tangible waves of aggravation which are emanating from behind Arthur's typically implacable expression.

At least it's _warm_.

But Ariadne thinks she'd rather he didn't go, after all. She skips from one foot to the other, gains a little momentum, gives the heavy bag a quick _one-two_ jab with the right and then what she considers to be a downright brutal cross with the left. Being ambidextrous has a _lot_ of advantages.

Arthur does not look as impressed as she'd have liked, and that's one of the reasons she'd like Eames around; not because he's any quicker to dole out praise, far from it, but because he at least goads her into trying harder. The impassive wall of Arthur's mechanically-handsome face –

Damnit, he's infected her with the whole "robot" thing now as well. Ariadne focuses on redistributing her weight, unleashing another _one-two_ , _one-two_ , _one-two_ of short straight-punches. She can't uppercut the heavy bag, the angle's wrong, but she feels that would finish up better. Arthur's wearing a suit, a _fucking suit_ , so sparring is going to be a while yet. Ariadne _one-two_ s again.

The silence is as oppressive as if the ceiling was lowering onto all their heads.

"Don't you have people to call, Mister Eames?" Arthur says, breaking it.

"Can't call either of them until after five. You know the rules," Eames says, his hands behind his head. She doesn't need to look to know; he's using the sing-song voice, which means he has his hands behind his head, his curiously rough and used knuckles resting on the damp brick wall and his broken, curled-up pinky touching the uppermost shell of his ear.

Ariadne releases her lower lip slowly from between her teeth, and hits the bag with such a savage short straight she's afraid she's split the leather for a moment.

Arthur raises both his eyebrows and nods minutely, an acknowledgement that, if nothing else, she caught him by surprise.

But if she gets a response from Eames she doesn't hear it; her heartbeat is a little too loud and a little too fast.

"I also know there is absolutely no reason for you to be sitting around in the training area," Arthur says. His voice may be carefully flat, but Ariadne knows the difference between Arthur's flat voice when Eames is absent and when Eames _isn't_ , and she imagines the change is a fine silt of pissiness in the bottom of his mind, or the increased strain on his willpower as he keeps from laying into Eames the way she periodically does.

Ariadne doesn't even have any _reason_. Arthur's self-control must be incalculable.

She wonders if, like the speed bag, it occasionally splits under the strain, and what – if anything – trickles out when it does.

"It's raining outside and my apartment building has a leak in the roof," Eames says, nonchalantly.

Ariadne _one-two, one-two, one-two_ s the bag in a steady, hard rhythm, as if her fists are feet pounding the pavement, like last year when she ran the marathon. Instead of one foot in front of the other for twenty-six miles, it’s one fist in front of the other until she's either knocked the stuffing out of the bag, or Eames and Arthur have knocked the stuffing out of each other.

"You live on the fourth floor," Arthur says placidly, the kind of placid that hides knives in its pockets and probably a hypodermic needle full of something lethal, like an actual honest-to-gods assassin (Eames was probably lying about that as much as he was lying about never having been a fighter himself, with his busted finger and his fist-worn features). "Unless every single other apartment between the fourteenth floor and yours has a gaping hole in the ceiling and floor –"

"You know, it's funny you should mention that –"

"If I give you twenty bucks will you go and annoy some hipsters in Starbucks and leave us in peace?" Arthur asks.

He appears to be speaking to the air in front of his face, and he nods for Ariadne to continue when she takes a break to stretch her deltoid. She wishes he would hurry up and fix the speed bag so he doesn't have to stand directly in front of her while she's training, in that _suit_. It's as beautiful and elegantly-tailored as Eames's clothes are abusive to the eye and imagining them sharing a wardrobe at any point – though they've both assured her that they did – is mind-boggling; no matter how nice the suit, she doesn't think it has any place in front of her when she's trying to hit harder.

Ariadne skips from foot to foot abruptly, imagines that Arthur is Dr Stimson and that he – well, _she_ – has just made some scathing and unhelpful remark about her work in front of the entire rest of the class, and that this is the reason there is a suit in front of her; she hits the heavy bag so hard that a miniscule puff of sand escapes into the dank air.

"I thought you'd never ask," Eames says, and his cheerfulness has the same hidden weaponry as Arthur's inflection-free voice. "I assume you have plenty of pocket money left over from your _never going anywhere or having any fun_ fund."

"Oh that was cheap," Ariadne mutters to herself, but in the echoing box of the basement they both hear her.

"My wallet is in my coat," Arthur says simply.

"No, it's in my pocket."

"You're not allowed to do that any more," Arthur says quietly, so quietly that Ariadne thinks maybe Eames didn't hear it at all.

"I wasn't allowed to in the first place, _sweetheart_ ," Eames says, and Ariadne nearly jumps away from the heavy bag in alarm at the acidity of the endearment. Jesus Christ, it's like being _stabbed_ unexpectedly and it's not even aimed at her. "But you're not in a position to order me around any more, in case you'd forgotten."

 _Eighteen months_ , Ariadne thinks as she steadies herself by the heavy bag and tries to regain her internal equilibrium. She's been training with them, working with them, for a year, and for six months before that they were already done with, finished, over. Allegedly. And yet they still manage to tear strips off each other in passing that leave her, in the middle of it, almost gasping for breath.

"Do you want anything?" Eames asks her. "Coffee?"

"No coffee this close to fights," Arthur interjects, which achieves nothing but to antagonize Ariadne.

"Beer?" Eames offers, pointing Arthur's leather wallet at her. He looks pink-faced and uncomfortable and she cannot figure out why. "Limousine? Manhattan loft?"

"No beer before fights," Arthur says, and as Ariadne looks back to him she sees the flush creeping up out from under his shirt collar and realizes just how close they are to hitting each other.

"You two to stop squabbling?" she suggests, as lightly as she can. "Or, uh, water. I forgot my water."

It's a flat-out lie. There's a sports bottle of perfectly good isotonic water in her bag, because Bethany is a good and considerate roommate whose boyfriend can't row for the next eight months because he broke his wrist. She doesn't need water at all, but something about Eames and his red ear-tips and his swollen mouth makes her want to give him something useful to do, so that he doesn't feel like she's sending him away in favor of Arthur, only in favor of uninterrupted training.

Something drips from the roof onto the floor, somewhere unseen.

"Okay," Eames says, disappearing with Arthur's wallet.

"Asshole," Arthur says under his breath as the door bangs, and there's easily as much if not more venom in his voice.

  


"Hey," Bethany says as soon as Ariadne gets into the apartment – it takes a minute because she has to climb over Ethan's bike, which he can't use _either_ with a broken wrist, and which for some reason means he has to store it in _her_ apartment. "Check it out, you look like a superhero."

"What?" Ariadne holds the bike against the wall and hoists her kit bag through the door. She rattles the chain across and looks down at herself dumbly. Mostly she looks like a really sweaty person who needs a lot of a shower and to possibly incinerate her training clothes rather than – as she suspects she will – putting them right back on again tomorrow afternoon without laundering them.

"On the poster," Bethany clarifies, shoving her chair, _Ariadne's_ ergonomic fucking chair, back from the desk. "Look, you should have a cape or something."

She examines the poster Bethany's holding up. There are two women, one in shadow, one in the light, and the one in the light looks enough like her that she knows it's meant to be her, in a heroic pose with her chin up and her gloves ready. It's a scratchy but elegant style, one she hasn't really seen before, and which certainly isn't hers. Apart from anything else, Ariadne can't draw _people_ for shit.

"Check you out, Wonderwoman," Bethany says, waggling the poster so that it sways back and forth like a curtain in the wind. "I already booked tickets for me and Ethan, this is some exciting shit."

"Where did you get that?"

The living room is a fucking mess, because neither of them have space in their tiny stupid rooms to work on their individual projects, but considering most people Ariadne knows at college don't even have a living room in their apartment it's a small triumph they can work on this stuff at home at all. She weaves her way carefully around stacks of studies on juvenile delinquency in the deaf and partially-hearing youth of New York (living with Bethany this long, she's got a pretty good handle on what her thesis is) to take the poster out of her roommate's hand.

"Matthew gave me a pile to put up on campus. Think I should put a bet on you?"

"Are you _clinically insane_?" Ariadne chews the inside of her mouth until she realizes she's drawn blood.

"No, just socially. Also, you have medals," Bethany reminds her, as if Ariadne has somehow forgotten winning State and then being _barred_ from Nationals. "So I figure unless they've got you up against the Incredible She-Hulk, which Matthew assures me they _haven't_ —"

"Oh you mean _Eames_ ," blurts Ariadne, who occasionally forgets that her manager has a first name because literally no one uses it. _No one_.

Bethany gives her the kind of look Bethany usually gives her when Ariadne hasn't had any coffee yet and can't quite figure out how to turn on the TV or open the bathroom door, and says, "Yeah, your _manager_. Remember him?"

Ariadne gives her the finger.

It's just that she can imagine it too easily; Eames "casually and by accident" running into Bethany, burbling something enthusiastic and charming and full of shit about him having heard all about her, and asking if she's coming to support her roommate, and probably touching her on the arm a few times for good measure – just because Bethany's got Ethan doesn't mean she's not susceptible to flattery, and if there's one thing Eames is good at it's _charm_.

"You okay?"

Ariadne puts her hand to her face in the sudden flush of heat and says more throatily than she'd intended to, "It looks like a f—like an ad for a computer game, not a sporting event. What the hell is he doing…"

She really does look like Wonderwoman. A short, flat-chested Wonderwoman. It's a nice picture.

Her face is almost certainly red. She avoids catching her own reflection in the framed certificate Bethany insisted on hanging over the TV. It's Ethan's, which just makes Ariadne want to stick her fingers down her throat whenever she remembers _he doesn't live here and it was her idea to put it up_ , and when she's having one of her more childish moments.

"Yeah, I just … you do know this isn't _legal_?" Ariadne takes her hand away from her face and plays with the hem of her hoodie, stretched and deformed over her sweater like she's smuggling drugs in it. "I mean, it's not an officially-sanctioned kind of –"

"Oh I got that from the way it's at Mott & Barley's and on a street that has a crack house on it," Bethany says carelessly. "It's cool. I have Biffy. I will bring Biffy."

There are times when Ariadne feels very uncomfortable around her roommate. One of those times is when Ethan is around and doing his best to stick his hand down her deliberately too-tight pants whether Ariadne is in the room or not, and the other is when her five-foot-three-inches, frighteningly perky, Dutiful Japanese Daughter roommate talks about the gun she keeps in her underwear draw next to her completely unnecessarily-mentioned collection of vibrators and which she calls _Biffy_.

" _Crack house_?" Ariadne repeats. Her legs are giving her hell. She cooled down, but evidently not enough, and now she just wants to shower and pass out, not write fifteen to twenty pages of comparison between the modern applications of Steamboat Gothic and Carpenter Gothic for a hypothetical structure in _Moscow_. Unlucky draw of cities, maybe not as unlucky as the guy who got Adelaide, but still.

"Yah, you know, place where people smoke crack?" Bethany retrieves some thumbtacks and pins the poster to the wall under Ethan's certificate, leaving Ariadne momentarily stunned for a number of reasons she can't quite articulate. "Mott & Barley's is about five lots down from this crack house Ethan's dad's got surveillance on. He was telling me last night."

"Oh, whatever, it's a shitty neighborhood," Ariadne sighs, relaxing.

"Did you really not know his first name?" Bethany asks idly, smoothing down the poster in a gesture that makes Ariadne's insides turn over and her brain start playing scenes from _Single White Female_. "I swear, hasn't he been your manager since forever?"

"I'm going to slap you," Ariadne says without rancor. "Right in the face." She drops her kit bag and stumbles toward the bathroom, nearly kicking over a card box of notes which might be hers and might be Bethany's.

"I'm going to shoot you in your sleep!" Bethany calls after her, entirely too friendly.

"I love you too," Ariadne shouts, shoving the bathroom door open.

Once it's locked she wrestles herself out of her layers and examines herself as clinically as she can. Her biceps are getting firmer, but she also has a bruise under what counts as her right breast mostly because "nipple on an ironing board" isn't a medically-accepted anatomical term.

Arthur tries not to hit her hard, which is in itself aggravating as all hell, but she's noticed that when Eames has been through, slinging bad feelings and leftover, soured love at Arthur like the contents of an unflushed toilet, he's less careful about that. The light overhead buzzes like a jar of peevish bees, and she turns on the shower mat, crossing her legs for speed rather than stability.

The bruise in the mirror is fist-sized and pale. She prods it. It's not deep, it barely hurts; Ariadne is merely unfortunate enough to bruise easily. And, well. She'll get him back tomorrow.

She sits, naked and sore, tired and slightly weirded-out by things she can't quite put a finger on, and thinks _or I could take it out on Eames since it's technically his fault_. It is plainly his fault, because he gets on Arthur's nerves on purpose. Maybe not with the anticipated result of Arthur's sparring getting markedly more vicious, but …

Ariadne rubs Gloop into the soles of her feet. It's actually _called_ "Gloop".

…. But in the year she's known him, Ariadne has at least worked out that Eames generally knows exactly what effect he's going to have when he does something, because the man is – and maybe she shouldn't have been watching him this closely, but she's _intrigued_ – is a surprisingly Machiavellian borderline genius for someone who dresses like he should be selling used cars and talks like a British Lord with a head injury. One who can't spell most words the same way twice. He does it on purpose and he knows it makes Arthur a better sparring partner for her.

That might not be _why_ he does it. But he knows that's a result. Definitely.

Ariadne stretches. The bathroom is also a mess. Bethany likes potpurri, because she is insane and because she smokes and therefore has no idea how unbearably vile it smells, and she likes cute bathroom paraphernalia, because it has somehow escaped her that their bathroom is a repurposed broom closet. Ariadne, on the other hand, owns kind of a lot of various miracle muscle toners and supposed detox shampoos because she's _human_ and not immune to advertising – Ariadne stops defending herself to an invisible jury and turns the shower on.

Sparring with the Robot – _Jesus, Eames_ – Arthur is good in some respects, but it's a little predictable. She's studied Catriona's fight footage (another woman who's slipped from the pedestal of amateur contests into the shadier world of paid-cash-into-your-damp-fist back-room fights, her medal-winning bouts are still on YouTube), and she's pretty sure that Mrs Florentina isn't going to be the same pattern of easily-dodged shots as Arthur, even though her reach is about the same.

Stupid leggy Italians.

The shower has warmed up enough that she can get in without dying of hypothermia; Ariadne zombie-lurches into it, slams the dirty Plexi-glass door – she can't remember which of them is supposed to be cleaning the shower door this month or even this lifetime but she can see the answer is clearly _neither_ – and rotates like a chicken on a spit with her arms in the air until everything, including her fingertips, is soaked.

Stupid leggy Italians with their enormous orangutan reach can't do _that_ without bending at the knees. Ariadne feels briefly, childishly smug. There are some small victories she just has to allow herself.

Eames is a more unpredictable partner on the days when Arthur is unexpectedly detained by his _other_ job – Arthur says training bodyguards, Eames says he's a male prostitute in the employ of the state senator, and she's inclined to believe Arthur mostly because he doesn't have the imagination to lie. It's not something she thinks you can say of Eames.

Ariadne scrubs distractedly at her armpits. Yeah, yeah, maybe she should shave. And maybe she doesn't care if she looks like a "miniature lesbian gorilla", thanks, Bethany.

He's slower than Arthur, in part because of his knees, and he hits weirdly because his fists don't close all the way, but she at least never knows where the hits are coming from next. He feints convincingly.

She spends what feels like an eternity rubbing some supposedly magical sports shower gel into her lats. Stupid lateral muscles.

And then he goes and claims he was never a fighter. Bullshit.

Ariadne snorts lukewarm water at the shower wall and laughs at the absurdity of the lie. With that finger and that face and those perfect feints. If he wasn't a fighter then she's a ring-tailed lemur. She pauses mid-massage, somewhere around her sternum now, unconsciously following the movement of one of his best. He'd clipped her ear – more gently, perhaps, than Arthur would've – and she'd, she'd…

Ariadne mimes the hit in slow motion. It wasn't her best uppercut but it got him, bouncing across his chin and into his lips, smashing blood out of his skin and an unexpected whoop of victory out of her mouth _and his_.

She inhales slowly and pretends that she hasn't noticed she's playing idly with her left nipple.

And that she can't remember the stomach-churning feeling of victory and _something else_ that left her uncomfortable for the rest of the day, every time she looked at his swollen mouth, the dried-on smear of his blood just above his lips which he must have wiped there, unknowing, and then left.

Ariadne inhales a little more sharply and puts the shower gel bottle firmly on the floor. Fine, _fine_. She's not the one with the sex-shop's-worth of vibrating weirdness in her underwear drawer, damnit, and it's her shower too. She can too fucking jerk off in the shower if she wants to.

Of course that's not the actual problem, but Ariadne ignores it in favor of readjusting her feet on the non-slip mat in the shower tray and mentally barking _come at me, bitch_ at her libido.

She pauses with her fingers in her pubic hair as the apartment door bangs hard enough to make all the partition walls on their floor shake. No, no, fuck it. She's – well, she hasn't quite started but she's nearly started and she is going to finish, thank you, Ethan or no Ethan.

Bracing her elbow on the tiles for the moment and acutely aware that if she has some kind of masturbation-related accident a couple of days before her first _major_ -major fight Eames and Arthur will set aside their many and deep-lying differences and murder her, she casts around for something that will actually allow her to get off, because Ethan trying to get his one good hand into Bethany's panties is going to lead to nothing but a deflating ladyboner.

Ariadne seizes on the last thing that made her insides curl around each other unexpectedly and runs with it; hotter water, now, belts her hair and face and she remembers the weight on her right foot, the moment of impact, the smooth flow of energy from potential to spent.

Her index finger brushes against the side of her clit and she makes a fist with her other hand, unconscious-but-conscious.

The expression on his face was as pleased as it was hurt – adulation at her quick, vicious response, but later keen to scold her for not using her head. In the moment, though, in the moment; his lips spread in a smile as much as in a grimace of pain.

Her middle finger clamps down on the top of her clit, pushing it against her pubis. The shower water goes colder again, but it's not enough to distract her right now.

Even his head jerked back a little at the force of it. She _moved_ him, she hurt him. The ache in her shoulder is pure muscle memory but it's like new for a second as she leans a little harder on the shower wall and angles her hand so the tangles of her pubic hair don't get in the way so much.

Ariadne nearly swallows a mouthful of water and curves her hand, half of her hand into a C. Then, just because, just because, she crinkles her pinky into an uncomfortable, cramped coil against her hand, the mirror of Eames and his busted finger. At this angle it brushes on her inner thigh with every movement.

And there was blood on his teeth.

When he smiled —

Ariadne smacks the flat of her forearm against the shower wall as if she's losing her balance, though it's nothing external that's slipping.

When he smiled after she hit him in the face and split his already-fat round lips and felt queasy and victorious and _don't think it_ , when he smiled at her unrestrained injured pride and her anger and the force of her glove battering his jaw, there was blood on his teeth.

Ariadne's thigh muscles tighten and she leans forward until her head touches the shower wall, her hand wet twice over and her mouth open because she's _drooling_ again goddamnit.

Oh because right then while Arthur wasn't there and it was just the two of them in the basement and she'd just split him open and stood panting and blurting apologies they both knew she didn't mean, she'd wanted so many different things. In part to just seize him by the unquestionably complex head and kiss the blood out of his mouth because it was _hers_ , she just fucking spilt it, it belonged to her, and in part to just keep hitting and hitting and hitting him until he lay down and –

Ariadne makes a sound that is more retch than groan, magnified by the acoustics of the shower walls and the tiles and the weirdly high ceiling, and tries to regain her breath, swiping at the added slickness on her thighs.

It's not exactly the best orgasm she ever had, but there have definitely been worse.

She's light-headed as she turns off the shower and shovels her thoughts back into hidden chambers and locked boxes within her head.

  


Eight AM classes, the devil's most pernicious invention, drag Ariadne out of bed before the sun is even risen so that she can jog around campus a few times and use the gym shower to keep from drowning the rest of her classmates in armpit funk; she's not pleased about it, but the alternative is not doing any exercise until lunch time, when the gym will be full and the showers noisy and okay maybe she is a little paranoid that she will become slightly less fit if she _doesn't_.

It's chilly, but clear, a spring morning which verges on the perfect, vapor trails from passing airplanes stirring something between trepidation and a paradoxical calm. There are a couple of frazzled-looking students wielding enormous coffees, wrapped in coats but wearing shorts, and they turn to stare at her as she bobs past them. One other person is jogging, a surly-looking redhead who looks away as she passes, trying to avoid eye-contact.

Ariadne's feet are lighter than the air they're drifting through when she stops on the oppressed grass of the commons to do stretches, jumps, and a little shadowboxing, and she feels positive about the day ahead. No, her paper on Steamboat Gothic may not be a hundred percent perfect, but she's pretty sure they're getting an extension on it anyhow.

A man in a caramel-colored trench coat with nineteen-thirties facial hair approaches her from the shadow of one of the buildings, one of the labs she hasn't been in. Ariadne's heart leaps in her throat, a sudden stab of fear accompanied by the sense of rage at being ambushed thus – she refuses, _refuses_ to be a campus statistic and if he comes any closer she will _break his face_.

His footsteps echo off the walls, because the place was designed by a moron, and the early morning light gives him no shadow to speak of; but he stops several yards away and calls her by name, his chin jerking up at the end of the shout. He's tallish, compared to the men she usually associates with (except Ethan, but she doesn't really associate with him more than tolerate his presence in her apartment because Bethany gets upset if she doesn't), and something about him makes her think of private investigators or journalists from old movies, when they had "press" written on a ticket in their hatbands.

He's not wearing a hat.

"I need to talk to you," he says, which doesn't exactly encourage Ariadne to drop out of the aggressive stance she's taken.

"Yeah, you're talking to me now. _From over there._ " She makes it perfectly clear that this is a request he's either going to grant or suffer over.

"I need to talk to you about your fight –"

"Do you want to maybe keep it _down_?" she snaps. There are lights on in some of the classrooms and there are cars in the parking lot not far from here. She doesn't want him any closer, either.

"Miss Shaw, I can't talk any more quietly and you don't want me to come closer, and I understand, I really do, but I need you to know what a bad business you're getting into –"

"Already know, thanks," Ariadne barks back, clenching and unclenching her fists. He's too far away and the light too low for her to get a good idea of when or how he might come at her. If he has a knife, or a gun. Fuck. Where's Bethany with her retardedly-named fucking gun when you need her?

"I don't think you do –"

"Have you told Catriona Florentina about what a bad business she's getting into?" she calls, her muscles twitching. She could just run. He probably can't keep up with her. But he knows where she's studying, he knows her name. How hard would it be for him to find her apartment?

And she doesn't feel like running.

"Yes, I have told her," he says, and he sounds defeated, "and I haven't been able to change her mind. I was hoping you would be more receptive. You've got a great life ahead of you."

"Do you have any freaking idea how creepy you sound?" she shouts. "Because I can explain it to you with a goddamn bar graph if you want. GO. AWAY."

"I'm trying to help you –"

"You're wearing a flasher's coat and it's seven in the morning, and you're talking _wistfully_ about my 'great life' ahead of me, sir," Ariadne yells, and for the life of her she has no idea why she calls him 'sir' beyond a certain sense of infuriated sarcasm. Part of her is still freaking out, alarmed by the shape he cuts and the fact that he knows her goddamn name, and a dark-red part of her deep inside wants him to _just fucking try it_ so she can beat him until he begs her for mercy – She shakes the thought away, alarmed by the ferocity of it and piqued that he's making her lose control just by standing there like a creep. "That's not helping anything except 'you to get off'."

"My name is Dominic Cobb," he says, in a weird, shouted-whisper, "I just need you to listen to me for a minute and think about what I have to tell you."

"Okay, so now you sound like a screwed-up evangelical pamphleteer instead of a potential rapist but you know what? It doesn't make me want to hear what you have to say, Mister Cobb!" She's not sure how much of that she was intending to call out to him, but controlling the confusion of urges, fight _and_ flight and possibly also _call campus security_ and to her hot-cheeked shame even _cry_ , controlling them is making it a little harder to keep track of what's coming out of her mouth.

“My wife was a boxer,” Dominic Cobb says, and his voice is so sad that Ariadne nearly lowers her fists. “Do you understand me? I know what you’re doing. And I’ve come to ask you not to.”

“You’re full of shit,” Ariadne tells him. He doesn’t sound full of shit. He sounds achingly, heart-breakingly honest, but that doesn’t necessarily stop him from being crazy.

“I married Mal Cobb,” he says in a low, hollow voice that carries across the empty commons as easily as his raised one did. “You’d know her as Mal de Mar. She died of a brain hemorrhage from a blow to the side of her head.”

It _does_ occur to her to assume he's lying, briefly, and to assume that he's crazy a little less briefly, but whether he's insane or not, he's right about how Mal de Mar died. Ariadne's not stupid. Her last coach – her last _official_ coach – wasn't stupid either. He might have thought _she_ was clinically retarded for failing a drugs test but he certainly wasn't stupid. She knew all about how Mal de Mar took a shot to the temples too hard and at the wrong angle and twenty minutes after winning the match collapsed and died in a parking lot, in the arms of her husband – if this is her husband then –

"I know," Ariadne says, but the aggression has drained out of her voice some. She doesn't know what the face of a man who had his wife die in his arms looks like, because they're not exactly advertised. Maybe Ethan's dad knows. Maybe her mom knows, maybe someone else knows for certain, but there's enough light now that she can see pain etched into his face, in lines that are deeper than his body says they should be, in the way he holds himself as if he's carrying the world on his back.

Or he could just be crazy.

"You don't have to do this."

"No, I don't," Ariadne agrees, lowering her left fist but keeping the right up, loosely curled. She will take him down with one goddamn hand if she needs to. She knows she's fast enough.

"Miss Shaw, if it's money you need there are other ways to get it," says Dominic Cobb, his hands falling limply by his sides. If it's a hint, she doesn't take it, and keeps her right up, ready. Soon there will be other students blurring and stumbling through the commons on their way to early classes, people to distract him, someone to call campus security.

"Oh, like _stripping_? Come to give me your card, have you?" she shouts, spurred on by a sudden hot embarrassment that she might, even if only for a moment, have been taken in by some bullshit sob story only to let some slime-coated pimp try to drag her into stripping. So maybe the money wasn't bad and she had nothing against the girls she knew who _did_ but Jesus Christ, no. No.

He shakes his head, apparently unoffended and unmoved, which just makes her all the angrier.

"I can – myself – a bursary – if you really need it –"

The words come out broken not by any intruding wind but by the apparent collapse of his sentences, and Ariadne raises her left again, glaring at him until her eyes begin to sting. "Go away, Dominic Cobb. I'm doing this because I want to."

The sound of an airplane breaking the sound barrier far overhead rips through all the other early-morning noises of the city and tears a hole in the sky. She doesn't flinch; he looks disconcerted, as if someone has slapped him, gently, to see if he's only sleeping or really dead.

"Please consider what you're doing."

"Please don't hesitate to get lost. You're trespassing."

"Actually," Cobb says, sadly, "I work here."

  


When Ariadne gets to the basement and finds only Arthur and a roll of posters she's pretty sure are she's not actually disappointed, not really. It'll be quieter, and she needs to concentrate, and Arthur – thank God – isn't wearing a suit today. She guesses his bodyguard training classes are an ad-hoc thing rather than a set-days one, but she also thinks she doesn't care that much.

After all, Arthur's capable of making his training sweats look like they've been cut to fit him, and she's still mad from earlier. The basement is no doubt as freezing as always, but the feeling of nearly being conned has been coursing so hotly through her veins all day that she can barely tell.

"You look like you've been sparring already," Arthur says, cautious and unruffled as ever. His kit bag is on the old school chair, not the bench. It is balanced perfectly.

She still has so much residual rage that Ariadne wants to go and kick it off onto the floor, upset the internal balance of the thing, and possibly of Arthur as well. She feels a long way from being the Zen lake of placid ducks or whatever that Arthur is whenever Eames isn't around.

"I had a run-in with some suspiciously well-informed creep who wants me to quit boxing," she says, throwing her hoodie in the general direction of the chair and beginning her stretches right off the mark. "What I can't figure out is if my parents somehow put him up to that shit or if he really is –" she shakes her head and stretches her forearms, her biceps, triceps. "– If he really does work at my campus, why haven't I seen him before?"

"Who?" Arthur says.

She's not sure if she's imagining the indefinable weirdness in his voice at first; it's very faint, an inflection that could just as easily be the distortion of the room itself, and she has her head between her knees when he says it.

"Oh, this _guy_ ," Ariadne says dismissively. She straightens out, stretches up until her back is warm and she feels at least three inches taller.

"That's not narrowing the field," Arthur says, exasperated. His exasperation is barely perceptible, but after a year of training under him Ariadne is quite familiar with it.

"Creepy weirdo in a flasher coat who said he worked on campus and wants me to quit fighting because I have a wonderful life ahead of me," Ariadne says, straightening out and actually looking her coach in the face for a moment.

"Did he give you his name?" Arthur asks, mildly. His expression is one of the small handful that he apparently has access to – damnit, Eames – which comes under Carefully Blank, Variant: Concerned.

It would be stupid to say he was hiding something, because as far as Ariadne knows Arthur is always hiding _everything_ , he's just a lot less circumspect about making it look like he's not hiding anything in the first place than, say, Eames.

"Where's Eames?" Ariadne blurts, making sure to catch his eyes every time she turns back across herself, each twist of the waist taking her further round and further back. "You didn't finally give in and kill him in a culvert or anything, did you?"

It's intended as a joke, and she keeps forgetting that Arthur just cannot _do_ jokes. It's not her fault he occasionally looks like Patrick Bateman. Or that Eames has clearly managed to sow the idea of Arthur Colbert: Serial Killer in her head from one too many snide remarks, even if it is just as a joke. Jesus.

He looks at her with Bemused Blank Look, Variant: I Have No Fucking Idea What You're Talking About So I'm Going To Ignore You. "Did he give you his name, Ariadne?"

She begins a series of standing quads stretches – they normally come later but this way she can keep up the eye contact, which is something Arthur is rarely very comfortable with.

"Yeah, sure, but no actual cards about being a 'manager for exotic dancers' or pamphlets about saving my soul, so I didn't really –" Ariadne puts her foot up on the chair and begins hamstring stretches. "– give it much thought."

This is an enormous lie, and she's a little disgusted with how easy it is. She spent the entire day veering away from architectural acoustics – and not just because it is a class which involves more math than any sane human being would willingly subject themselves to – in order to go over it in her head again. There are plenty of positions in the college she'd never have any reason to run across. Counselor, for one. It – his sad face and the way he said _you'd know her as Mal de Mar_ as if the words themselves were painful – has been playing on her mind all day, but she doesn't want Arthur thinking she's trying to chicken out.

Apart from anything else, his pep talks are possibly the worst in history.

"Then would you mind telling me?" Arthur asks, holding her foot while she lowers her bodyweight toward the floor, and her entire leg burns a little.

She squints up at him and says, "I get this feeling you already know who he is."

He at least waits until she's stood up again before putting his hands in his sweats pockets and stepping back from her as if she'd just slapped him. His brow furrows in – Ariadne bites the inside of her own lip in confusion – similar lines to Dominic Cobb's, like they've had time to mirror each other as exactly as Eames sometimes does Arthur. Maybe. Maybe she's imagining it, but she's not imagining the way his eyes look.

"You know him," she says, a little more certain. "Arthur why the fuck is this guy – how does he know where my classes are? How did he –"

Arthur sighs. "He has his ways."

"Well I feel so much more comfortable now, thank you. Who the hell is Dominic Cobb?" She probably shouldn't have leapt straight to shadow-boxing without doing some jogging or skipping first but it's either punch the air or punch Arthur, and she knows she'll just feel depressed if she hits him.

"Mal de Mar's husband," Arthur says quietly, his hands in his pockets. He doesn't even have the decency to shuffle uncomfortably or shift his weight, because he never _does_ , because Eames is probably right and Arthur probably isn't actually human at all. "He does work at your college, if that helps."

"Not especially," Ariadne snaps, switching to jogging just so that she can't accidentally overreach and hit him in the solar plexus.

"You should have had classes with him last semester," says Arthur, who occasionally knows more about her life than she remembers telling him about. They both do it – Eames, Arthur – but at least when Eames does it, it feels like he's taking an interest in her rather than keeping tabs on her to make sure she isn't about to commit some kind of _crime_.

"I – what?"

"He was on sabbatical," Arthur says, as if he knows the man personally. "He's supposed to be taking your classes on post-modern office architecture this semester."

Ariadne stops jogging and just stares. There's little else she can do besides actually going over there and unscrewing his head and pulling the information out of his brain with her bare hands. "And you know this how?"

"Oh god because they're _fucking_ ," Eames says from the doorway. "Don't panic, Dom won't do anything to sabotage the actual fight. His heart's in the right place." He wanders into the basement in a lazy zigzag and gives Arthur a pat on the shoulder which could not be any more passive-aggressive if he'd actually blown the man a kiss, adding, "Which just elevates the mystery as to why he bothers having anything to do with Arthur, as we all know he doesn't _have_ one…"

"Eames," Arthur says, red to the roots of his hair, "Shut the _fuck_ up."

"Are you drunk?" Ariadne mouths.

"I should be so lucky," Eames complains, sagging onto the school bench in his customary spot. He is wearing a shirt that looks like a chameleon having a personality crisis on a crosswalk. "But relax on the Cobb front. I'm sure Arthur will be able to work his amazing masculine charms on him to reduce the potential for _searing awkwardness_ in your post-modern whateveritwas classes."

"Shut the fuck up," Arthur repeats. He doesn’t swear often, preferring to conserve moments of profanity for when they're actually needed (unlike Eames and, Ariadne guesses, herself, who treat the f-bomb as punctuation), but he seems to be stuck in a loop now. "Eames, don't talk about things you don't fucking understand."

"I'm not taking post-modern office architecture, I switched for Neo-Classical Ecclesiastical," Ariadne says, hastily. It had been a very last-minute thing, and now that she thinks of it there may have been some increased interest in her class choices when she came to sign up for them, from both her manager and her coach…

"And if we both stuck to that regime," Eames says, his eyes shut and his hands behind his head, "you would never open your mouth again. Which, come to think of it, would be an immeasurable improvement."

"I'M NOT _TAKING_ POST-MODERN OFFICE ARCHITECTURE," Ariadne shouts. "Could you please, both, really, just … not do this. Again."

One of the doors further up the building opens and closes, the _bang_ reverberating downward through the empty doorway and into the basement like a ghost in the sudden silence.

"Anyway," Eames says, not moving or opening his eyes, "I just came by to tell you that your medical is today. Yusuf will be here in a couple of hours. I'm going to sleep." He slips sideways onto the bench, _oofs_ onto his back, and adds, "If Arthur can possibly refrain from murdering me while I do that would be wonderful," before throwing his arm over his face to block out the feeble light.

Ariadne glances at Arthur, who looks at the ceiling with his hands in his pockets and says in a too-loud voice, "Why can't you sleep in your own apartment?"

"Because the fucking roof fucking leaks," Eames says, rolling over on the narrow bench to face the wall. There are sweat streaks down the back of his ungodly shirt, and Ariadne's still slightly amazed that he can contrive to overheat in this kind of weather.

Almost immediately afterward, a drop from the ceiling of the room they are in hits the floor with a barely-audible _plip_.

"No. It. Doesn't." Arthur inhales slowly, exhales even more slowly, and says, "Ariadne, can you do two hundred with the rope and then back to shadows for a minute? The speed bag is fixed, but I'm not sure you're warmed up enough."

Ariadne waits a second, listening for any change in Eames's breathing, but it is soft, shallow, and consistent. He has apparently given up on the fight, which is not very like him at all.

  


Eames "sleeps" through the whole of her training session, sparring session, and cool-down, almost entirely without moving. It's very unsettling to keep looking over at him and find that his back is still turned – his always-surprisingly broad back – and his side still rising and falling gently like a dozing dog. She wonders how long he's been without sleep to be able to sack out like that, on a narrow piece of wood in a freezing basement filled with the reverberant echoes of punches and grunts.

"He's not asleep," Arthur says, watching her watching him. There's a distinct sourness in his voice; he's a little out of breath, but under that lurks an undercurrent of irritation. "He _snores_ when he's asleep."

"No," Eames says, apparently addressing the wall but immediately validating Arthur's observation, "I snore, on purpose, in your apartment, because you talk in your sleep and squirm all over the place like you're having a fit and think just because it's your apartment you don't need to share any of the sheets." He rolls over and sits up. It's like watching a flower opening, although possibly a flower drawn by a very bad art student; Eames rubs at his eyes and while Arthur is still glowering and white-lipped, adds, "Is Yusuf here yet?"

"Oh Eames, c'mon," Ariadne says, gently massaging the back of her calf, for some reason self-conscious about the sweat drying on her back between her shoulder-blades, the combination of months-old hair and sweater fluff in her armpits. It doesn't normally bother her so much. "When is he ever on time?"

There is another awkward silence in the wake of this moment of forced jollity; while it is still suffocating all conversation Arthur vanishes into the tiny bathroom without warning.

"So Cobb tried to talk you out of this?" Eames asks in a low voice, almost right away. He has his elbows on his knees and an intent look on his face – his stare is always like some kind of laser weapon, disarmingly and unsettlingly intense, but now it spreads to the rest of him, eager for an answer. "Because, and I'm sure – for once – that Arthur agrees with me, if you have second thoughts about the fight you only have to say so, and I'll pull you out. You don't _have_ to –"

"I appreciate your flexibility, Eames," Ariadne says, splashing water from another of Bethany's isotonic gifts over her arms and face in quick succession, "but I've already made up my mind. And I think you said Ichiroh Saito would cut your thumbs off if you switched fighters."

"Did I?" Eames looks genuinely perplexed, which she might believe if she didn't know him a little. "Exaggeration for effect, I promise you, sweetheart – Saito likes me, he'll, I don't know, break my other pinkie." He holds up the hand with the _good_ little finger, and waggles it at her with a weak smile. "And since I can't get a decent cup of tea in this country there's no reason for me to have functioning pinkies anyway."

Ariadne covers her face with her hands. They stink of binding-sweat and feel slightly alien, the way they always do after a proper work-out, and Arthur is _still in the bathroom_. "Oh god that is _not better_."

"Oh trust me, it is," Eames says, lightly. "You try playing poker with no thumbs sometime."

"Shut up," Ariadne chokes from behind her palms. She has no idea if it's a laugh, a groan, or a sound of genuine horror that's tangled up in her vocal cords, but she does know that even after several hours of trying to hit Arthur (and succeeding several times), she has a bewildering desire to jab Eames square in the mouth. "You're not funny."

"And that is precisely why I quit comedy," Eames agrees. "I'm quite serious, Ariadne, if you want to drop out you can do that."

"You'll lose money," Ariadne says into her hands. When she looks up he's still staring at her, and he looks a little pink in the cheeks.

"My dear Ariadne, I have so much experience in losing money it's practically a hobby. It doesn't matter."

He spreads his hands in what she supposes is meant to be a gesture of honesty; _I'm not hiding anything_ , which is ludicrous; the one thing anyone can say about Eames aside from the fact that he walks like a gangster when no one's looking or that he dresses like he's got a vendetta against other people's eyes or that he has a charming and self-effacing sense of humor or that his voice is surprisingly deep for someone who looks like he should be more of a tenor – the one thing, Ariadne thinks, jerking her thoughts back in line as another drop of water _plips_ from the ceiling, the one thing anyone can say about Eames is that he is _always hiding something_. He is the man with an entire pack of cards up his sleeve and a warren of bunnies in his theoretical top hat.

"I'm still doing it," Ariadne says, annoyed into staring at him again. "I don't – I don't get where everyone is getting this dumbfuck idea from that I'm going to suddenly drop this fight and 'preserve my own safety' or whatever, as if I've _never been in the ring before_ , Jesus." She even does the air quotes. She's not proud of that, but they slip out, along with a little of her native accent.

Fortunately Eames doesn't tell her she sounds like a hick, because he's too busy biting at his own mouth.

For a split second Ariadne pictures herself biting his mouth instead and the heat of the work-out is nothing to the hot flush that climbs out of her belly and shoots over all of her skin like a flash fire.

"The thing is," Eames says, in the kind of voice that makes it perfectly clear that he's been sitting on this for a while, "this isn't amateur sports stuff. You don't get a helmet. People have money on it."

"People have money on the amateur fights," Ariadne says, picking up her t-shirt and turning it the right way in briskly. "They're just less up-front about it."

Eames sighs. "Robert Fischer wants you to take a fall."

"He can get fucked." She's sure her language is deteriorating and she's equally sure it has to do with being around him; Bethany's even commented on it, and she's not exactly above calling the TV a whore when the cable cuts out herself.

Eames nods slowly, pressing the tips of most of his fingers together, his good pinky conspicuously deprived of anything to tap against until it curls over the top of his hand. "I thought you might say that. Exactly that."

"And Ichiroh Saito? What does he want?" she curses herself, just for a moment, for getting so far into this stupid business that she knows who these people are and what they're demanding. You don't argue with big book-makers, although in the mood she's in Ariadne figures she would probably pick a fight with her own reflection.

And why the hell is Arthur still hiding in the bathroom? She take a moment to run through a list of possibilities: he's jerking off (she feels briefly repulsed), he's doing coke (highly unlikely), or he's constipated (he certainly _looks_ constipated, but he doesn't move like he is).

She's starting to get cold. Ariadne reaches for her sweater.

"He wants Florentina to take a fall," Eames says, as if it's glaringly obvious – which, Ariadne guesses, it probably is. To _him_.

"And is she going to?"

It's disgusting to think she might be in a fight where the outcome is prearranged. Where someone is just going to lie down at some point and not get up, under _orders_ ; that's not a fight she's won, that's a fight someone else has chosen to lose. It's not even a _fight_.

Eames shakes his head, and there's something like a smile on his mouth. Ariadne forces herself to breathe calmly; she has a medical soon, as soon as Yusuf gets himself here, and she doesn't want to suddenly deal with a barrage of questions about her respiration rates.

"Catriona doesn't do lying down on command either," he says, and there's a weird fondness his voice; Ariadne feels her face flush, and ducks to keep her cheeks out of sight. Well that's _good_ , because she now wants to punch the woman's face off on quite a disturbingly visceral level. "Unfortunately that means Ichiroh Saito wants me to sabotage her."

" _What_?"

Eames shrugs, and Ariadne forgets she's trying to hide her face and glares at him, and she also recalls that Bethany said she looks like a really, really mad chicken when she does this, and she doesn't care. He just shrugs like the whole thing isn't any kind of big deal, and she should have expected it, his cheap ugly shirt staying in folds after his shoulders have fallen, stretched out of shape.

"They both want certainty," Eames says, putting such slight emphasis on the word _both_ that it takes her a few seconds to realize it's there at all.

"No, _what_?"

Eames cocks his head and says, "If you're planning on hitting me in the face can it wait until Arthur's out of the bathroom? I have this feeling he'd enjoy it."

Ariadne unclenches her fists. "So you're telling me that if I don’t agree to take a fall for Fischer, he's going to try to screw up my chances?"

"I'm not _telling_ you anything," Eames says carefully, and he licks his lower lip, delicately, as if he's running a few potential answers through his head. It's bullshit. He's probably worked this all out already, Ariadne thinks, breathing too hard. "And I promise you we're not going to let that happen. Either of us."

There is a tiny, a very tiny flicker of distaste in his voice at the 'us', and Ariadne is almost impressed that their petty bullshit is so important to him that it even infiltrates discussions about potential sabotage. Almost, but not remotely.

"Alright," Ariadne pulls the sweater down over her head and leaves her hands on where other women have actual hips rather than hipbone-ish things, keeping them out of play. "What happens if I tell Fischer I'll take the fall and then don't?"

Eames inhales slowly, sitting back against the wall. He watches her face, and the longer he looks at her the more twitchy and uncomfortable Ariadne's intestines become.

When she's suitably discomfited, Eames rubs his hands over his face and says, "Well then we all learn innovative new ways of holding pens and texting people."

"Jesus," Ariadne mutters, copying him unconsciously. She stops with her hands half-way over her face. "Well, thanks for that! So the upshot is _no matter what happens_ , someone's thumbs and/or fingers are getting broken?"

"Broadly speaking, yes," Eames says, apparently unfazed by this, "but on the plus side they might end up being Arthur's fingers."

"That is not a plus side, Eames."

"It's his _turn_ ," Eames says, holding up his broken pinky.

"Argh." Ariadne puts her hands on top of her head, trying to squeeze her brain into thinking. "This is such bullshit."

"Bullshit is my speciality," Eames points out, as if there is any way in hell she hasn't noticed _that_. It's plainer than the scar on his chin and the apparently bottomless depths of his eyes, plainer than the apparently omnipresent sweat patches under his arms. "So you let me handle this side of things, okay?"

"Exactly how are you planning on handling 'this side of things'?" Ariadne loosens and reties her ponytail, mostly to keep herself from punching him.

"Trade secret. Cannot possibly tell you. It may involve a certain amount," Eames leans forward again, and gives the room a conspiratorial look, an entirely theatrical conspiratorial look, before stage-whispering, "of _lying_."

"EAMES."

"Look, attached though I currently am to my thumbs," Eames says, brushing a hand over his sprayed-solid, Ken-doll hair, "I'm not above sacrificing a knuckle so that you can have this fight without any interference, if that's what you want. People will still make bets. Fischer and Saito will just be cranky because they don't _know_ any more."

"The kind of cranky that cuts off body parts," Ariadne says, reaching for her hoodie. The mental image of Eames bleeding from the hands is not having the effect she would have expected, and it's making her feel that maybe she wants to go home instead of having her stupid medical.

"Don't fixate on that. Think about _winning_ ," Eames says, with a smile that displays all of his off-colour, misaligned teeth. They are very _British_ teeth, and God help her, Ariadne actually finds it a little sweet – in moments when he isn't inducing homicidal feelings – that he doesn't have the wall of immaculate, orthodontically-perfect teeth that Arthur does, that her professors and classmates do. It suits his gait and his crows-feet and his awkward hands. "Arthur, you can come out now if you want."

Of course.

It hadn't even crossed her mind that the other reason he was hiding in the bathroom so long was to give Eames the chance to talk to her about this without incriminating herself. Jesus. How was she so _stupid_?

"It stinks in here," Arthur says, opening the door to the tiny bathroom. He is visibly repulsed, which is a first.

"Stop eating lentil casseroles then," Eames says without looking at him. He's still focused on Ariadne's face, and for an acutely _long_ moment she can't look away. "Settled?"

"Unsettled," she says, "extremely. Unsettled."

"I told you not to tell her," Arthur says. He sounds like he should be leaning on the doorframe of the bathroom, but he's standing with perfectly-centered balance in the doorway instead, because he's Arthur.

"Shut up, you're not helping," Ariadne mutters.

"And I told _you_ ," Eames says in a brittle-cheerful voice which is once again smuggling brass knuckles and shadows with it, "you aren't in a position to tell me what to do."

"Do not _do_ this," Ariadne warns, holding up her hand. She realizes a minute later that she's using her 'talking to badly-behaved dogs' voice, and a minute after this that Eames and Arthur have both shut up and are looking aggrieved and in Eames's case, very pink-cheeked.

She's saved, at last, from further back-biting, bitching, and distressing mental images and the distressingly _undistressed_ feelings that accompany them by Yusuf's timely arrival.

"Sorry, sorry," are the first words out of his mouth. He's wearing a knitted sweater and a heavy corduroy coat, replete with a dark green scarf and some incongruous and overlarge sunglasses for keeping the spring light out of his eyes, now pushed up into his boisterous curls and coincidentally keeping what was surely an unruly mass out of his face. He looks cold and he's out-of-breath, but these seem to be basic attributes with Yusuf. "Had student doctors observing and then they had questions and then the questions had questions and it carried on in a fractal infinity of ignorance until the universe broke down in my practice and I was forced to restart it using only will-power and coffee."

"You overslept," Eames translates, an apparently-genuine smile suffusing his features like the first rays of sun on a cold morning slipping through the sky – Ariadne shuts her mouth abruptly and concentrates on putting her bindings and gloves back into the increasingly stinky kit bag.

"That also happened," Yusuf agrees, and she looks up to see him struggling out of his coat. It is somewhat snug, although that may just be the knitted sweater. "Restarting the universe from scratch is very tiring work and my desk has quite a soporific effect at the best of times."

"And you stayed up watching the cricket," Eames fills in.

"How dare you. As if I'd waste precious hours of my life on those lazy, half-hearted, miserable buggers when they insist on using monkeys as bowlers in a bid to entirely destroy the good work of our batsmen," says Yusuf with a disgruntled expression. "Heartless bastards. Fortunately," he adds, opening his bag against his chest and flicking through what looks like several files, "I am accustomed to their treachery and committed an act of minor treason of my own, and thus I am two hundred dollars compensated for their _appalling bowling_."

To Ariadne's relief, everyone snorts at this, and Yusuf retrieves a slim brown cardboard file from his bag, letting the bag drop to the floor with a _thunk_.

"Right, right," he says, opening it and peering at the contents as if they're written in ancient Babylonic cuneiform, which would probably be easier to read than his actual handwriting if the samples Ariadne has seen are any indication. "Any difficulty breathing?"

"No," Ariadne says, _apart from when I consider that Eames is probably going to have his thumbs cut off by this time next week_.

"Increased heart-rate?" Yusuf looks up from his folder and adds, "You're just going to have to take an educated guess, I left the steth- in my office again."

"Yusuf," Arthur sighs.

"You pay peanuts," Yusuf says without apparent offense. "You get absent-minded doctors. I would say monkeys, but we've established they all bowl for India now."

"No, my heart-rate is normal," Ariadne says, staring past Yusuf at where Eames is examining his fingernails with the kind of intense scrutiny that's the province of scolded schoolboys and diligent manicurists. _Most of the time._

"Any soreness or stiffness of the joints?"

"No."

"Feelings of discomfort?"

"No."

"Trouble sleeping?"

"No." She's generally so completely worn out by the end of a day of studying and training that she passes out the minute she touches the bed, which is an excellent way of avoiding thinking too hard or too long about whether, maybe, she's doing the right thing. It has also, on at least one occasion this month, meant that she's fallen asleep while jerking off — which, while acutely embarrassing when she wakes up a little later and finds she still has her hand in her pajama bottoms, is at least the kind of acutely embarrassing which is between her and her own resigned sense of humiliation. The kind she can take to the grave with her.

Arthur sighs again. "Yusuf."

"Is there some _particular_ reason you're nagging Yusuf or have you just grown bored of 'Eames' in tones of impatient derision?" Eames snaps.

Ariadne frowns, and waits for Arthur to say something snide in return, and for the whole thing to escalate into another excruciating flurry of insults and half-buried hurts, but there's nothing but another eye-rolling sigh.

"This isn't a thorough medical," Arthur points out, not taking his hand out of his pocket to gesture at the situation the way that anyone else in the world might have. Ariadne chases the thought out of her head; she is not going to take Eames's side on this just because … just because. She's not.

"Did you pay me two hundred dollars for a full sporting check-up?" Yusuf asks, flipping to another page in the little brown file. "No, you paid me fifty bucks. For a standard office check-up, and I'm already less call-out fee. You _pay_ peanuts …"

"If she can't fight you have to forfeit our little side-bet," Eames says in a very loud voice, "And considering where you put your money I suspect it's in your best interests to make sure Ms Shaw can knock seven shades of shit out of that dizzy Italian bitch –"

"You bet on _me_?" Ariadne interrupts, rearranging her ponytail again for the sake of having something to do with her hands. "Yusuf?"

"Eames said you weren't going to take a fall for Fischer so I assumed it was the safe option," Yusuf says with a complete lack of concern, "and now I'm afraid an excellent point has been made, so you're going to have to take all those layers back off again so that I can get a proper look at you."

Ariadne glances at Eames, who shrugs so hard that it apparently causes him pain; her heart thuds unexpectedly and she averts her gaze to the floor as Yusuf goes through his bag, struggling out of her clothes while he rifles through his baggage for the appropriate instruments.

"You bet _against_ her?" Arthur asks, aghast. Ariadne assumes the question's aimed at Eames or it makes no sense at all.

She's _also_ interested to hear what Eames has to say to this.

"Please stop tensing up like that," Yusuf says into the following silence, sounding a little irritated. "You're making everything more difficult and it looks like you're having a spasm. I assume you are _not_ having a muscle spasm?"

Ariadne says, "No, just a brain one," while staring at Eames hard enough to drill through his head and into the wall behind.

"Stop having a brain spasm," Yusuf instructs, clearly irritated now, "Eames is running a _book_ , not betting against you. Anyone would think you were both mentally backward."

"What do you have against your thumbs?" Arthur asks, which takes Ariadne so much by surprise that she nearly laughs. Yusuf tuts, and she composes herself as best she can – still on edge and growing impatient with the whole business of being prodded, poked, and _hrm_ 'd at while all the while Eames is sitting there with his mouth shut and still managing to _lie_.

"For that matter, you might as well ask what I have against my wallet," Eames asks, but he's directing the answer to Ariadne, not Arthur. "I gave Ms Florentina abysmal odds. I had no idea Yusuf was so addicted to the safe bet –"

Yusuf snorts, but continues to squeeze Ariadne's tricep in a contemplative fashion.

"Ichiroh Saito is going to cut off your thumbs and then Robert Fischer is going to cut off your _ears_ ," Arthur says in what sounds suspiciously like dismay. "You're insane. I always knew you forged that discharge record. You _escaped_ from a psych ward."

" _Arthur_ ," Ariadne exclaims, shocked. Yusuf tuts at her again, and pulls pointedly on her arm. She tries to relax, which under the circumstances is a bit like trying to tap-dance in a tiger's cage without sweating.

"Two hundred and seventy to one," Eames says, still looking at Ariadne. "To Ms Florentina."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Holding her arm still in Yusuf's grasp is becoming something of a challenge of self-restraint, and he lets go to flick through the file again, leaving her to tense up all over again. "That's got no bearing on reality. You'll make people think you're fight-fixing, you –"

"It means I have every faith you're going to win this," Eames says, with a frankly sickening grimace.

She twists away from Yusuf's hands as he puts the file back down, and punches Eames in the eye.

  


The apartment is empty, quiet, and dark when Ariadne gets home; her hand is still a little sore – bare-knuckle hits are something she's not used to giving or taking, and she's secretly appalled by how much it hurt her to the ratio it apparently hurt Eames. Yes, his forehead split and he bled into his eye; yes, she found she was shaking from the waist down and nearly sick with _sensation_ as he, brushing off Yusuf's knee-jerk assistance, blotted at the bright red with his shirt sleeve. Yes, it had clearly smacked the back of his head into the wall hard enough for that to start bleeding too – as they discovered when he stood up and wobbled (and dear God, the feeling in her stomach was so confused she nearly retched).

But all Eames had to say on the matter was, "For fuck's sake don't hurt your bloody hand _now_."

Ariadne feels for Ethan's bike, but it's gone, which is something; in the silence of her apartment, ringing in her ears as she turns off her iPod and yanks out the earbuds in the dark hallway, is the silence of empty rooms, not sleeping ones. She guesses Bethany's at Ethan's dorms, which is disgusting to imagine (they are single-sex, and she's _met_ rowers) but convenient; she's not sure she wants to listen to them screwing through the wall, even less so in the turbulent mood she's come back in.

Dumping her kit bag in the hall for someone else to fall over, she's set on going straight to bed when she hears a soft, edge-of-audible breath from the living room and immediately freezes, a thousand and one violent scenarios blasting through her already-tumultuous mind like a rapid succession of jabs to the brain.

The sensible, smart thing to do right now would be to sneak as surreptitiously as she can over the chaos of laundry bags and textbooks to Bethany's floral-scented room and get her gun out of the shoebox in her closet; the savage battering in her chest demands that she just charge into the living room and beat whoever she finds until the police have to indentify them by the imprints of their teeth on her fists –

 _You're five feet one,_ she reminds herself, _and your knuckles are still red from punching Eames._

The living room light snaps on, a low orange glow that floods the corridor, and from where she's standing she can see a pair of very good black leather shoes and the bottoms of some equally high-quality black suit pants, in a sharp-backed position, like their owner is sitting to attention rather than sprawling the way she and Bethany usually do in that spot.

"Ms Shaw," a soft, grave voice says, as Ariadne's heart slams into her ribs like a recently-caged bear and blood roars through her ears, "Perhaps you would do me the honor of entering instead of lurking like a burglar in the hall?"

She could still go get the gun.

Ariadne steps into the living room. Sitting on the uncomfortable loveseat, surrounded by the undisturbed mountains of books – Ariadne spots _Changing ideals in modern architecture, 1750-1950_ – and papers is a middle-aged Asian man in a suit whose tailoring would probably give Arthur an actual erection.

He looks as if he has been carefully placed there as an ornament and for an overwhelming moment she feels like she's in the principal's office, about to have Words about her Recent Conduct. Her hand throbs in short-lived sympathy with the delusion, and the attached memory.

She reminds herself that he has broken into her apartment, and the red-hot rage comes surging back to her like an old familiar friend at an airport.

"You mind telling me what the hell you're doing in my apartment, Mr Saito?" she asks, her voice tight with the fury of intrusion; she reroutes all her anger at Eames and his inexplicable risk-taking bullshit to this new target too, until her body is buzzing with adrenaline and she can hardly _see_ past it.

"I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that," Saito says, still contriving to sound like some hybrid of God and a state governor, "but for the sake of good manners –"

"—You broke in—"

"I own this building," he corrects, without lifting so much as a finger to shush her, and this information floors her so completely that she has no reply "As of this morning. As I was saying, it is only a matter of formality. I have come to ask that you don't make any kind of deal with Robert Fischer."

"I'm not going to," she says, automatically. It's been the backbone of most of her conversations today that haven't been about spiral staircases or thesis titles.

"I had planned to offer you a significant winning bonus," Saito says, with the very faint specter of a smile – he is a hard man to read, Ariadne concludes, and her vision is annoyingly fuzzy what with the red mist descending. "And any assistance I can, medical, legal, or financial, in helping you to win your fight."

Ariadne becomes acutely aware that she is standing in her training clothes with her dirty hair escaping from an overused piece of elastic in front of a man whose suit probably costs as much as a year's rent on her apartment. It does nothing to render her more amenable.

" _Medical_ ," she echoes.

He nods at a small orange tub on the arm of the loveseat. Ariadne has never been too hot at Kim's Game, and if she registered it at all before now she probably attributed it to Bethany, not the stranger on the sofa with his neat, manicured hands and patriarchal air.

"You know why I got kicked out of Nationals?" she asks, something solid in her throat blocking the words until they sound small and hollow instead of the raw-edged yell they were in her head.

He inclines his head so slightly that it's hardly recognizable as a nod. "I also know that in an illegal boxing match run in a basement by men whose contact with USA Boxing is only that of scooping up talent they have chosen to discard erroneously, there is no interest in your use or non use of marijuana … or any more beneficial substance."

"And what you _don't_ know," Ariadne says, struggling to sound wry rather than wrathful, "is that my mom said she'd beat my ass black and blue if I ever took anything stronger than a coffee bean again."

Saito nods his minute nod again, closing his eyes like a contented cat. "Far be it for me to court the displeasure of a no doubt formidable adversary."

Ariadne is too tired to work out if she's imagining the quirk at the corners of his mouth and whether that means he's mocking her. "You're that invested in me winning? Keep Fischer away from us."

"I'm sorry?" says Saito, as if she's drunk. He even peers at her mouth, as if he's trying to discern from mumbles.

Ariadne's nostrils flare; she knows she enunciated perfectly well. She also knows she heard her native accent a little more heavily than usual but he has no business making fun of it.

"You know he's going to fuck up my manager – _me_ – my trainer – if I don't take a fall for him?" she says, pretty certain that Saito is very much aware of this already. "I _like_ having thumbs, Mr Saito, and I don't like unfair fights, and I guess Catriona would like to keep her thumbs too –" she becomes aware that she's just spitting words out in a scattershot hail of sarcasm, and curtails the flow with a curt, "I want a fair fight."

He raises his eyebrows in the same expression of polite disbelief she's sure she's seen on Arthur's face before and says, "You want a _fair fight_ at Mott  & Barley's?"

"I want my thumbs," Ariadne says, aware of how idiotic this sounds, but floundering somewhere between drunk-on-adrenaline and half-asleep with exhaustion, post-training and post-trauma. "You understand me, Mr. Saito?"

There is a lengthy pause, and Ariadne finds herself in the peculiar position of being both drowsy and alarmed. "I understand you require protection," Saito says, eventually, "and I can promise that Fischer's men will have no opportunity to do any harm to you or yours, whatever the outcome."

"That was very mealy-mouthed," Ariadne sighs, oddly grateful for the chance to pick holes. The whole situation is dreamlike in its unreality: the low light, the creepy stillness of Saito on her tiny sofa, the mannerly way the whole conversation is taking place, the absence of any extraneous sounds – the heating and the sirens of the city are both silent as the two of them circle around each other at a healthy distance, feeling for weaknesses. Ariadne has an abrupt, powerful sense of déjà vu and the sudden fear that she's hallucinating from stress swims through her gut.

"I apologize," Saito says with another of his impenetrable mouth quirks, and Ariadne sways on her feet, "I am a lawyer first and a businessman second, and it behoves us all to be careful with what we say." He surveys her for a moment and adds, "I can be more blunt if you prefer."

"Don't fuck us over," Ariadne says, and a yawn steals up on her and pries her clamped jaws apart without her consent.

"Forgive me. It is very late, and you have morning classes," Saito says, standing.

The illusory feeling shatters, leaving Ariadne paralyzed with the cold, creeping knowledge that this man, this immensely powerful, composed man with his money and his violent retribution, can go wherever he wants, can step into the apartment whenever he pleases, whether she's asleep or awake.

"I give you my word that, unless I have direct evidence of your submission to Robert Fischer's demands, you and your employees will go unharmed by me and mine."

He extends his hand, and on sleepy autopilot Ariadne shakes it; it is soft and a little dry, and he smells of some kind of skin crème rather than any cologne.

"You will also be free of any interference from Fischer," Saito adds as an apparent afterthought, and he moves from the room so smoothly that for one tired moment she thinks he could be a ghost, until the apartment door closes on the tail of his wholly corporeal exit.

The light illuminates an unchanged room, barring the orange pill bottle of what she assumes are Adderall. Ariadne looks around numbly, wondering quite what she's looking for – ectoplasm streaks, a hologram projector, a human-sized mouse hole – and with legs that are no longer interested in holding her up, she sits hard on the warm dent he has left in the cushion of the loveseat.

She exhales, slow and steady, and half-way through the breath explodes in hot, angry tears of humiliation – until her chest hurts and her head aches, drawing her knees up to touch her nipples and cramming her wrist into her mouth in an attempt to stifle any gasps for breath.

 _Unless I have direct evidence_ isn't a promise. It's not even the absence of a veiled threat.

  


"Both my black eye and my stitches are fine, thank you," Eames says the minute he answers her.  
"Sorry," Ariadne mutters, shielding the mouthpiece of her cell from the wind that's howling around the outside of the library building. "Does your apartment ceiling really leak?"

"... Like a motherfucker," Eames says cheerfully. "I'd show you, but we're on the phone, and I'm in Starbucks, and now everyone is staring at me for saying 'motherfucker' in front of a small child, which is as much your fault as the fact that I spent last night throwing up." He pauses for breath, but before she can get a word in edgeways he plunges on, "But if you punch Catriona like that I'd say the odds on my side book are entirely accurate, if not wildly optimistic _on her side_." He sounds pleased, and then there's a raspberry on the other end of the line. " _Yes, madam, but I'll willing to bet he hears worse at school._ "

Ariadne stifles a surprised laugh and leans back on the wall as an insane and possibly kamikaze cyclist shoots past her on the pedestrian walkway, instead of the cycle path. "Uh. Does Saito know where you live?"

"I was sort of hoping you were going go invite me to stay with you until my roof miraculously heals itself at the hands of our missing super," Eames says sadly. "Yes, Saito knows where I live. As does Fischer, and several other supremely dodgy fellows you won't have heard of, I hope." He sounds so matter-of-fact that for a moment she almost forgets that they're talking about the kind of men who remove or break important body parts. "Can I ... should I assume you had a visitation?"

"How does he know where I live?"

"The ways of men of means are somewhat beyond the knowledge of mere mortals like me but I imagine tenancy agreements and mail are the place to start looking, or they were when I – _if that's espresso then I'm a walrus, is there any caffeine in this at all?_ –" He mutters a few more disaffected complaints about the state of the coffee and there's a loud rush of traffic noise on his end of the line; Ariadne has to step into a dead, empty flower bed to avoid another cyclist. "Are you okay?"

"That depends if you define okay as 'a career criminal bought up my apartment block and broke into my living room'," Ariadne says, almost under her breath – she's aware that Eames has selective hearing, but she's also aware that when he selects to hear something it's surprisingly acute. "With a certain amount of guilt over concussing my manager during my medical."

"A veritable Dr Seuss book of shitty happenstance," Eames agrees, in a similarly low voice. "I think you should ditch your afternoon class and come and sample some novel cuisine with me. I say novel, 'ancient' is possibly more accurate. Also 'abhorrent', but the important part is that they are _cheap_ nasty cabbage dumpling things."

"I can't." Ariadne steps out of the flowerbed and wipes dirt from her shoes onto the path. She feels strangely as if she's in costume, wearing clothes which are built for something other than freedom of movement and the likelihood of being sweated into; the scarf, the neckline, even having her hair loose feel today like she's stepped into someone else's body and is simply playing at being a grad student in borrowed clothes. "Afternoon class was cancelled, there's nothing to ditch."

"So you're fully capable of succumbing to the lure of nasty cabbage dumpling things?" Eames sounds as if he's wearing 'casual' with as much success as she's currently wearing 'student', and she wonders if Saito showed up in his leaking apartment during the night too, or whether it was Fischer, like the ghosts of Christmas Broken Fingers, with threats and hammers.

"I'm afraid Arthur has me on a strict diet of not eating things that taste like poop."

An airplane flies overhead; at the other end of the conversation a car horn blares. There's a fractional connection between the two noises, as if the one was the continuation of the other, and Ariadne walks away from the library with her bag bumping her ribs and her phone pressed to her ear like an earmuff.

"You're a dirty liar," Eames says, "Arthur's diets consist of nothing but things that taste like poop, with a side order of virtue and boredom and alcohol ban."

She laughs, more because it's something that isn't the tension and the horror of the last twenty-four hours than because he's at all funny – even if he is accurate as ever – and leaps out of the way of another cyclist, who calls her a bitch even though _he's_ the one on the pedestrian walkway.

"Alright, you got me, I'm a liar. I am secretly longing to gag at the smell of cabbage dumplings," she says, holding her hair out of her face before the breeze can blow it into her eyes again. "Alright, Eames, you win. I'm going to come out and find you and I am going to eat _disgusting_ cabbage dumplings and fart my way through training this evening and make Arthur suffocate to death – your evil plan the whole time, am I right?"

"Cannot confirm or deny these rumours," Eames says, and another car horn blares angrily in the background, "but can at least assure you that if you were to arrive at the McDonalds around the corner from hideous cabbage dumpling establishment, there might very well be some form of burger atrocity available to your discerning taste buds."

She laughs again, leaving her hair to assault her face and side-stepping out of the path of the next cyclist, who waves at her in thanks. "Oh but then I can't kill Arthur with my butt."

"You could still kill Arthur with your butt," Eames assures her, "it is a particularly deadly weapon."

"Oh god, you really _are_ concussed."

"Well, come into town and knock some sense into me, then," Eames says, and the sudden cessation of noise suggests he's stepped into another building. "If you run you can be here before all the good seats have gone."

"You're bored, aren't you?" she asks, amused still. He seems to be in good spirits, which, for someone who is facing digit removal and afflicted with a sore head overall, is something of a triumph of his intrinsic good nature – the one she's sure he has, and which Arthur is very sure he hasn't. "You're bored and you want me to help you slack off."

"That and no one I can talk to really makes themselves available before five," Eames agrees. "Come and be bored with me. I can tell you about the leak in my apartment ceiling. If you're good I will regale you with all the different colours in which my remaining pairs of socks come. I understand it's not quite the maddening dullness you'd get with Arthur, but you have to appreciate that you're spoiled for quality on that front; very few people can produce the level of tedium that he does –"

"You're boring me _now_ ," she interrupts, turning off a side path that takes her parallel to the library, through some battered-looking trees, "I'll see you in an hour. Try to look a little less like the victim of domestic abuse, can you?"

"Fine," Eames actually _chuckles_ like someone's uncle, and hangs up on her.

The cyclists evaporate like spilled ethanol the minute she's out of the conversation, leaving her alone in the scruffy grass and untamed flowerbeds, the wind and the blinding spring sun which makes her wish she was as well-prepared for it as Yusuf.

Her first thought on hearing someone behind her is to sidestep again, convinced it's another cyclist.

"Ariadne."

She pivots inelegantly on her heel and nearly slams into Cobb as he stops on the path.

"Fuck—" she makes some incoherent gesture of frustration and nearly drops her cell phone before she's had a chance to throw it away; wrong-footed and in regular clothes, with only Arthur's word that he's not going to do anything to her as a shield, she feels her throat tighten and images of a low-lit Ichiro Saito flash in her mind. "Are you _following_ me?" Her hair whips at her face as the wind swoops in to attack the back of her head, and sets the few flower heads around nodding aggressively.

Cobb takes two or three steps back, until he's no longer in her personal space, and puts his hands in the pockets of his coat. It does nothing to diminish his resemblance to some kind of black-and-white movie private detective, or her distrust of him. "I'm afraid not. I have to take a class in the Eastman building in half an hour."

He inclines his head in the general direction of the building. She knows which one it is – the majority of her classes are held there, along with the art history students and the library sciences students, an odd boiling pot of the scrag-ends of the college courses – but the movement still distracts her.

She whips her head back around to squint at him again, hair buffeting her eyes.

"I _am_ pleased I found you here, though –"

"Yeah, I bet," Ariadne mutters. Without noticing it, she's slipped her hands inside her pockets, hunching her shoulders like a pissed-off teenager, like that will somehow stop him talking to her.

"Ariadne, I really think you should hear me out."

"I've heard you. I _can't_ drop out." She despises herself for phrasing it like that, when she means _regardless, I am not dropping my fight_ , as if someone else's entreaties, threats, cajoling, whining, or creep-tastic appearance in her apartment in the middle of the night are going to stop her getting in the ring and punching Catriona Florentina in the face, stomach, and chest as hard as she physically can.

"If you're facing some kind of threat –"

Ariadne laughs so hard and so bitterly that she almost retches, and catches herself in time to stop herself from looking _completely_ crazed, but only by the skin of her teeth.

"– You _are_. I can, I can find you protection."

The desperation in his voice is sudden and severe, like a cliff-edge she has blundered up against, roaming around in the dark; Ariadne examines him more closely – the dark pits of his eyes, the pleading note in his voice – and wonders if it's her he's trying to convince of his usefulness, of his ability to _stop the bad thing happening_ , or himself.

"From Fischer? From _Ichiroh Saito?_ " She could have taken it more gently, she could have played to his deep-sunk sadness, but delicacy has never been Ariadne's strong suit. Only speed and decisiveness, and even in the ring that's not enough. She watches the foundations of his protectiveness crumble in on themselves and rebuild, in the lines on his face, and thinks of how awful it must be to go the rest of your life trying to undo some horrible mistake by preventing other people from making their own.

"… No," he says, and she watches him sink in on himself as if she'd punched him in the stomach outright, as if she's detonated something in his spine and now all the floors of Cobb are collapsing down to the ground in slippery volleys of bricks and mortar, concrete and wire, dust and despair. "That, I can't do."

"Then leave me alone," Ariadne says, turning away from him, "because I have no idea who it is you think you're going to protect me from."

  


McDonalds is crowded out with noisy children and just as noisy but differently-pitched teenagers, and under circumstances where she's even lying parallel to sanity Ariadne would just swivel on her sore heel and march right back out of there and into somewhere less overflowing with bodies and sounds and the wobbly strains of _Happy Birthday_ being sung in Brooklyn accents by children who sound like speaker feedback. Right now, with a thousand thoughts to avoid thinking, she's grateful for the chaos.

It takes a minute, among the lurid colors and the smells which have some vague relation to food, never mind the howling and sniggering and alleged singing, for her to spot Eames; when she does she's surprised she managed to pass over him at all. He looks positively dowdy in comparison to all the bright red hoodies and imperial purple letter jackets with their gold foil tigers, which isn't to say that he is dressed like a reasonable member of the human race so much as to say that in a restaurant that has clowns on the staff, he's far from the most appalling eyesore in the room.

He looks pensive until he catches sight of her, and then he simply waves a monstrously tall and mysteriously unwrapped something-burger with additional gloop at her so violently that several pieces of melted cheese and candy-cane stripes of ketchup and mayo fire across the table and lie in a repulsive rainbow of dairy and sauce.

"Arthur's diet specifically states no things that taste like poop," she reminds him, sliding into the seat opposite after checking it carefully for errant sauce. "Are you okay? You look … slightly well-dressed."

His shirt is dark purple with lemon-yellow stripes at wide intervals and he has cufflinks in the shape of some sort of blue rectangles with windows on them, but for Eames that is verging on restraint.

"Well, I had to see a lawyer," he says, shoving the burger toward her, "and the Bermuda shorts went down so badly last time."

"She was probably hypnotized by your well-turned ankles," Ariadne says, looking at the McDisaster and trying to determine if she's hungry enough to eat something that appears to be deep-fried in misery. It's not that she's fundamentally against McDonalds, more that she knows Eames has gone out of his way to find the most demented burger on the menu just to prove some sort of weird point.

"I believe he used the phrase 'paralysed by revulsion'," Eames says, stuffing fries into his mouth. He leans over the table and whispers with a mouth full of pulverized once-potatoes, "He also said I made his brain feel nauseous."

"Friend of Arthur's?"

"Close former colleague," Eames agrees. "They used to shoot children in deserts together or something."

"I'd never have pegged you for having a vendetta against the armed forces," she says, stealing his fries and pushing the mountain of beef and cheese back toward him, touching it as little as possible. "You could have ordered salad, they do salad." She knows he wouldn't dream of doing something that Arthur might approve of, even if it means spending more money and ordering something neither of them will eat.

"You said no poop-flavoured food," Eames says, "and having _been_ pegged by a member of the armed forces I can safely say — sorry, too much information?"

Ariadne stares down at the plastic-looking bun barely holding together a slithering pile of processed offal and tries to decide whether she's sick or hungry, or if the sudden feeling of having had a stick twirled in her stomach is something else that she'd rather not look into too deeply. The bottom seems to have temporarily dropped out of her digestive system, and she concentrates on the burger in front of her until she's sure her face isn't about to change color. "Yes."

"So," Eames says, clearing his throat pointedly. "Apart from unwanted guests of the criminal variety, how are you? Keeping well? Dressing warmly? Ready to knock every available shade of shit out of some gobby Italian?" He bares his teeth in what isn't actually even an effort at a smile, and offers her the remainder of the fries. There aren't that many left.

Ariadne sighs and collapses dramatically over the McDonalds table, her face resting on her forearms. It's not necessarily the most mature of moves for a woman in her early twenties, and she's resurrecting it from the vaults of her high school-era sarcasm, but it suffices for the moment; from her uncomfortable position she mutters, "What are we going to do?"

"Hrm," Eames says, with perfect diction. "Ms Shaw, henceforth to be referred to as The Boxer, will be engaging in a fight of a potential twelve rounds against Ms Florentina, henceforth to be known as The Opponent; until either full-time is reached and a judgement made based on hit points, or until the match is curtailed by way of knock-out. Preferably, I would add, on the part of The Boxer. _I_ , henceforth to be referred to as _the diligent and hard-working manager who paid for Ariadne's unwanted burger_ , will promote this match and rake in the cash."

"Fuck you," Ariadne tells the table. "I meant what are we going to do about Fischer, and Saito. And Cobb."

"Cobb's not a problem," Eames says, stepping around the main body of her point with as much ease as always.

Ariadne lifts her head high enough to stare at him through her hair. She wishes she'd brought some stupid hair elastic with her, but playing at being a responsible grown-up apparently requires more planning than she was anticipating. "Oh, because Arthur says so?"

"Yes, mostly," Eames says, leaning the paper bag of fries against her forearm. "Much as it pains me to say this. Also, he doesn't have the imagination to lie."

"No, but Cobb could be lying to him –"

"He's not stupid," Eames says, with a grimace, as if he's just eaten a dog shit. "Oh god, look what you made me say."

She snorts. "I think that's the first time I've ever heard you say anything nice about him."

"I'm not being nice about him, it's factually accurate, and please don't make me do it again." Eames makes another incredibly childish face and lunges for a cup of coffee she assumes is his, taking a quick and awkward swig. It's his right hand, the smashed-pinky hand, that grabs the cup, and his finger lies curled against the side like a piglet's tail. He pauses with the cup about an inch off the surface of the table and adds, "Also, I said he was a goodish lay, didn't I?"

"No, and please don't.

"Alright, I shan't."

There's what would, in other circumstances, qualify as a long silence. Here it is simply a lengthy pause in the conversation aptly filled by the hysterical shrieking of a child who is less than thrilled by the arrival of Ronald MacDonald, and, in Ariadne's opinion, rightly so. She hunches up until her chin rests on her clasped hands, and the abandoned fries spill across the table in a fan.

"What are we going to do about Fischer and Saito?" she repeats, her hair in her eyes and her heart in her toes. "He said he wasn't going to do anything to us but I don't trust that any further than I can throw Salisbury Cathedral."

"That was oddly specific."

"It's a very beautiful building," Ariadne mutters.

Eames shoves his coffee cup to one side and mimics her position, his broken finger protruding from his linked fingers almost, but not quite, far enough to touch hers as he stretches over the table. The scar on his chin bisects the stripes on his shirt cotton.

"Look, vicious criminal bastard or not, Ichiroh Saito is a man of his word, alright? If he said he's not going to fuck with us, he's not going to fuck with us." He has somehow contrived to sink his head lower into the table than she, or else she's straightened up without noticing; either way, he looks up at her, and it makes her throat hurt. "Did he say anything about Fischer?"

"He said he wasn't going to let Fischer do anything to us either. _Unless he has evidence I've taken a fall for him_." Ariadne sits up and shakes her hair out of her face until she feels something closer to human again, but Eames doesn't take the hint, and remains sprawled across the table, peering up at her from his folded hands with his round shoulders and his multi-colored black eye.

There's a twitch somewhere inside her again, and she bites, furtively, on the inside of her cheek.

"Then what's the problem?" Eames asks in a surprisingly tentative voice. She jerks her head away from his question, his gaze, as if he's tried to take hold of her face with his hands, and gets an eyeful of hair for her pains.

"I don't _trust_ him."

"You don't have to," Eames says. "Do you at least trust me?"

It's funny, Ariadne thinks. She oughtn't. It's not as if he's inherently trustworthy. He exudes sleaze and indolence with as much regularity as sweat, and his morals are almost certainly as cheap as his shirts, even if she discounts most of what Arthur says about him as motivated entirely by spite and anger. But the truth is the truth; "Yes."

"Then can you trust me on this?" Some of his hair has, by some miracle of exertion or air-conditioning, escaped from the usually total domination of gel and whatever else he puts on his head to keep it so molded into place and at odds with his general air of scruffiness. It hangs in a thin, greasy rope across his eyelashes, and he makes no move to blink or brush it away. "There is no need for you to worry about Saito, or Fischer, or Cobb. Concentrate on your fight."

"What about you?"

"What about me?"

Ariadne waves the thought away with an irritated hand. The cacophony of children and teenagers, clowns, and kitchen staff has become overpowering; intertwined as it is with the TV static of carefully unthought thoughts buzzing in her head and the pre-fight nervous adrenaline which keeps spiking and simmering down at unexpected moments, the anarchy of the restaurant is like a blanket around her common sense, dulling its every impulse.

Eames frowns. "What _about_ me? You don't have to worry about me. What the hell would I do?"

"More a question of what'll be done to you," Ariadne mutters.

Much to her surprise, he slides back in his seat until he can fold his arms over his face and says into his shirt, " _Nothing_ is going to happen to me."

"Doesn't sound like it," she says, poking him in the wrist with her forefinger. It's meant to be friendly, but nothing in here is stable or predictable, and she feels her prod slip into a grab, until she's got his wrist and his pulling his arm away from his face.

His grimace is revealed as she yanks and wrestles his right arm down with her left, slamming it in slow-motion to the table-top. "Maybe I want something to happen," he says, almost under his breath.

"Like _what_? You already have a black fucking eye –"

He's putting up very little resistance, and in the small rational section that's left of her mind she's glad this McDonalds is already full of people yelling, cussing, and making sudden movements, or someone might actually _notice_ what's going down.

Eames flattens his free hand over the bridge of his nose. "— And I'd like to ration myself to one right now, if that's at all possible –"

"No, what exactly do you _want to happen_?" she snaps. She's yelling at someone in a McDonalds. Great. It's a good thing her mother can't see her.

He just winces and sits almost as still as Arthur, his arm flaccid in her grip; Ariadne wonders at what point she overstepped the mark, and looking at the bruise deforming the lie of his eyelid she can say it probably wasn't even _today_ that it happened.

"Something which isn't going to," Eames suggests, and she can feel his pulse jump in his wrist as she keeps it pinned to the table, just as his eyes keep her pinned to the spot instead of giving in to one of the several whirling impulses which is dragging her around by the chest. At least one of them is to storm out and hide in her room for the rest of eternity, which is neither feasible nor particularly characteristic; another will have her arrested, and the third catches her as much by surprise as a plank across the back of the head.

"Like what?" Ariadne demands, snatching his left hand away from his face and slamming it against the table, "Like this?"

She's not sure, even as she lunges, if she means to head butt him or kiss him, and as it turns out, it's sort of both.

Ariadne narrowly avoids smashing her teeth against his, but their lips collide so hard that they hurt, and when she feels moisture against her tongue it has the coppery taste of blood. She keeps her hands on his hand, on his wrist, holding him against the table instead of clutching at his face, and later she'll feel absurd about their position and hot-cheeked at the memory of the wolf-whistling and the yells of _get it_ from teenage boys, and about the fact she's doing this in a lousy crowded McDonalds in the middle of the afternoon; right now she shoves her mouth against his and feels the thump of her heart in her throat and the way he pushes back against her lips, bleeding into her teeth.

For a moment, when she starts feeling light-headed from lack of air, she's still reluctant to stop kissing him. As soon as she tears her mouth way from his soft, split lips, she'll have to hold herself to account. He's going to look at her sadly and tell her it can't work or that it's unprofessional and she will either scream or _cry_ and neither of those things is going to go down well right now, right here; she latches onto his mouth for dear life and clenches harder on his wrist, and Eames _utters low growling groan into her mouth_.

It's so unexpected that she has to stop, has to; she leans her forehead on his and winces. "Sorry. I. Is this what you meant? It had better be what you fucking meant."

"I'd give you a reassuring pat on the back but I can't move my hands," Eames says, in a sort of weird, breathless half-laugh.

"Oh God, sorry," Ariadne mutters, her face pressed against his. She doesn't move her hands. She thinks her arms are shaking too hard and that if she moves her hands at all she'll fall over, or have hysterics. The teenagers are bored by them now; she can hear one of them yelling about Usher being a fucking pussy, and the world has yet to grow back from the bubble it shrank down to while she kissed him.

"I wasn't _complaining_ ," Eames says in a low, unexpectedly throaty murmur that makes her want to either punch him or bite his mouth or kiss him again or _something_ , something… "But yes, that, yes, that is, it is what I meant."

"Fuck," Ariadne adds, turning her face along his until they're cheek-to-cheek and she doesn't have to look at his eyes any more. She has an unpleasant feeling that her top is in the spilled ketchup, but it seems like a very distant issue right now.

"That would also be nice," Eames says in a distinctly wistful voice that still carries the weird half-laugh which, Ariadne realizes with an uncomfortable twist in her stomach, sounds a little like despair, "But I'm not holding my breath."

"Are you going to say that this is a really bad idea?" Ariadne whispers. Their position is idiotic; his arms must hurt but she can't bring herself to let go, and she's certain now that she is definitely getting cheese and ketchup on what count as good clothes when she's wearing them to class. She's half-bent, banana-shaped, over the table, and he's ostensibly her prisoner until she gets her shit together sufficiently to release him.

Something _else_ does a wild and disruptive circuit of her entire torso.

"I can lie, if you like," Eames says, his mouth almost touching her ear, "but, well, it _is_ a really bad idea. Professionally. It's fucking atrocious. Arthur would wag his finger so hard his hand falls off."

Ariadne yelps with unexpected, desperate laughter, right into Eames's ear; he doesn't so much as flinch. He must have nerves of steel, or at the very least eardrums of latex.

"Do you want your hand back?" she asks, embarrassed by how tightly she's digging her fingers into his wrist, and into the solid, flesh-and-bone lump of his left hand. "Hands. Do you want your _hands_ back."

"Not especially," Eames says in the same, low, throaty voice as before. "You can have them if you want them."

It takes a moment for her to work the lump out of her throat, to rearrange her vocal cords into something that's neither a growl nor a scream, something that doesn't sound like his weird despairing laugh, something that makes any kind of coherent sense. "I thought you said this was a really bad idea."

"It is," Eames agrees. "Appalling. A worse idea than a shopping mall at Ground Zero. Worse idea than the Millennium Dome. A worse idea than my _haircut_."

She doesn't rise to it, just rests her cheek on his, her mouth an inch from the bottom of his ear, and waits. He's warmer than her – hot, like a human furnace wrapped in cheap shirts and fake watches, his hair products melting in contact with his scalp – and she can feel his heart thumping through his whole body, too fast and too hard.

"But you don't want your hands back," Ariadne says, at last.

"I built my life on incredibly bad ideas," Eames says, so quietly that, even with her ear so close to his mouth, that she thinks she might be imagining it. "And as bad ideas go this does at least have some undeniable perks."

"Do you do this every time someone throws themselves at you?" Ariadne chokes, briefly glad that he can't possibly see her face burning before she realizes he can probably _feel_ her blushing furiously.

"Oh yes, all those _other_ times attractive, intelligent women have kiss-attacked me in public," Eames mutters, his breath like the swamp of summer air on her earlobe as he snorts, "I can't say I do, no."

"Oh god, _shut the fuck up._ "

"If you want," Eames murmurs, "it's entirely your call. _Everything is_."

The _something_ does another violent lap around Ariadne's insides and makes her flex her hands on his wrists, swallow hard, shift her weight; none of it stops her face from flushing again.

"Can I make one tiny suggestion?" he adds, catching her by surprise.

She nods, very gingerly, loosening her grip on his hand, but not his wrist.

"Perhaps we should get out of McDonalds."

  


By the time the floating feeling of adrenaline has drained from her legs they're half-way down the block, and she can still smell his cologne and his sweat on herself. Ariadne hopes it's not affecting the way she's walking, but she can't help thinking she used to walk in straight lines before. The sun has started to fall again, dipping below some of the taller buildings and casting stripes across their backs as they head back in a direction that she's not admitting is vaguely toward her apartment.

"Did you see those kids by the door?" Ariadne says, looking for a reason to move her mouth and shut off the fireworks going off in her head, "They looked like they'd never seen human beings before. I thought I was a zoo exhibit."

"We cut a very dashing and exotic couple," Eames corrects her, "what with my impeccable taste in clothes and your avant-garde method of ketchup consumption."

Ariadne holds her top out in front of her, where it is drying in the low sun and consequently giving her a freezing cold front until she can close her coat over it, and looks down at the streaks of dabbed-away ketchup and cheese with a rueful expression. "I'd like to say I am a _bit_ better at getting food into my own mouth normally."

"No you're not, I've had _countless_ meals with you, Ms Shaw, and you always end up dropping something on your lap."

Ariadne flips him a wobbly bird. Half-way through she surrenders to the impulse, and grabs his wrist, pulling his arm flat by his side until she can slide her fingers down over his pulse and lock them between his. Hers are thin and red-knuckled and short, his fat and rough, his pinky curled up like a sleeping snake against the palm of her hand.

The angle is weird and probably uncomfortable for him, but all Eames does is catch her eye and mouth _thank you_.

She doesn't really think about it until they're waiting at the crosswalk, her hand still trapping his as if he's going to make a break for it at any second, leaning toward each other in some altered gravity, and he says something inane about the absence of any birds overhead and the presence of them all over the sidewalks – he says "pavements", still – something like "they've fallen off the sky like leaves off the trees".

"What do you mean, _thank you_?"

"Mm?" It's a common habit of his, this, the _mm_. It has always sounded faintly obscene; now it just sounds like hedging.

They're borne forward on a tide of people, out of the sunlight and into the dark on the other side of the street, and as they dodge the oncoming crowd – there's a woman in an amazingly bright red coat – she only just hears him say, "I'd hoped you were going to."

"Do you never actually just _act_ on anything yourself?" she calls over her shoulder, dragging him across the middle of the road. She's only mock-exasperated, amused by his reticence, until he catches up with her and gives her hand a squeeze, along with his answer.

"You might want to ask Arthur about that," Eames says, as wryly as she'd have expected, but it joins two separate trains of thought in her head and stops Ariadne dead in the middle of the street.

"Oh ff—" she hisses, whipping her hand out of his in horror. "Arthur's going to _kill_ me."

"No, that'll be the oncoming traffic," Eames says, trying to shove her forward with his shoulder. "You're in the middle of the _road_ , sweetheart."

She strides across to the other side as fast as she can, not looking to see if he's keeping up, telling herself she doesn't care if he follows or not, blinking more quickly than is normal or right, her eyes hot. "Fuck, fuck, fuck…"

"He's not going to –" Eames pants, catching up with her, and starts again, "—if anything he'll just pity you a lot. I promise you."

She stops again, and an aggrieved and very much local shout of _I am fucking **walking** , lady_ erupts behind her . Ariadne steps out of the way of the angry man with too many store bags and leans against the wall of the nearest building for a minute.

"So he's going to be angry with _you_ instead –"

"I don't know if you'd noticed, because he is very subtle about this," Eames says, patting her awkwardly on the upper arm, "but Arthur is angry with me _all the time_."

Ariadne punches him lightly in the chest – _lightly_ – and still feels immediately guilty when she remembers that the garish eye make-up is her fault too. "Yeah … why _is_ that?"

Eames looks up and down the street and says, "We should talk about that somewhere else, some _when_ else, when I don't have a head injury any more."

She squints at him, her eyes still adjusting to the shadows, and sighs. "Does that mean I'm not going to want to hear it?"

"Oh no," Eames says, proffering his hand, jerking on his axis as another irate shopper slams into his shoulder without even a pretence at trying to walk around him, "it's a fascinating tale full of derring-do, derring-don't, and a six-month jaunt to Russia, which in itself is an adventure worth recounting. Just not here. And not now."

She levers herself off the wall, and ignores his hand. "Does your eye hurt?"

"Yes."

"Sorry."

"Mm," Eames says, with a quick, tight smile, "No need for that."

  


They reach her apartment building without any further delving into the complexities of Eames and Arthur's relationship, and with minimal being-shouted-at-by-strangers, and only one instance of her dragging him into the doorway of a closed-down store by the arm and kissing him the way she'd wanted to earlier, her hands on his face, his – finally – clasped across the small of her back, dragging them closer together until a hooting cry of _keep your fucking clothes on, bro_ brought them stumbling back to reality.

"So does _your_ ceiling –?" Eames begins, as they climb into the elevator.

"No, I just get unexpected Saito in the middle of the night," Ariadne says grimly, rubbing the ball of his thumb with the tip of hers. He squirms against the pressure and coughs as the elevator doors open again.

They stand stiffly suppressing laughter all the way to her floor, glared at in turn, over and over, by a wizened-looking old man that Ariadne has never seen before in her life.

Ariadne is just about to put her key in the lock at her apartment, Eames hanging back in the corridor, when the door jerks open from the inside and both Bethany and Ariadne give a start; Bethany squeaks, Ariadne says _yah!_ in surprise, and Eames sniggers.

"I was just going to Ethan's –" Bethany says, leaning out of the door to peer down the corridor.

"Oh good," Ariadne says, too quickly, and she nearly hits herself in the mouth to cover the mistake, blundering on, "I mean, have fun. Are you going to be back later?" She doesn't need to turn around to know Eames is making faces at the back of her head at her lack of subtlety; she flips him off behind her back.

"I, uh," Bethany leans around her, and raises her eyebrows at Eames before giving Ariadne an _enormous_ and frankly scary smile. "Yeah, I'll be back tomorrow morning.  You owe me. Anyhow, I'm going to, going to Ethan's now."

"Great, I'll see you tomorrow and uh, yeah," Ariadne says, widening her eyes warningly, and stepping out of Bethany's way. "See you… later."

"Sure and – aren't you going to introduce us?" Bethany asks, smiling like a tiny Asian fucking _shark_. She even points right at Eames, and beams back over her shoulder at Ariadne.

"Nope," Ariadne says, holding the apartment door open with the flat of her hand. "Anyhow, didn't you already meet?"

"Yeah, but not, like, officially –"

"You met! That's official!" Ariadne sneaks sideways a little further into the hall of her apartment and tries to beckon Eames in using only her eyes. She's not sure what level of success it actually has. No one has ever exactly commented on her 'come to bed' eyes before. In fact, they mostly haven't commented on her overall sexiness at all, and she has an idea this may be connected to her tendency to punch guys in the stomach when they get too close.

"I gave you posters," Eames says, helpfully, waving at Bethany like she's a dangerous dog on a too-long leash. Ariadne tries not to choke on what is either an impatient growl or a bark of laughter.

"So anyway," Bethany says, over the top of them both, "I'm Bethany, and you're –?"

"Not allowed to introduce myself. Bye," Eames darts past her with surprising agility, past Ariadne, and into the apartment. From inside the hall he grabs the back of Ariadne's coat and pulls on it, not hard enough to move her but hard enough to make the point.

Ariadne waves Bethany off with a _what the fuck are you doing_ expression, Bethany returns a very similar one, and Ariadne closes the door almost into her roommate's face.

"So," Ariadne says, exhaling slowly and setting her back against the door with enough leverage that she can keep the door closed if Bethany decides she's 'forgotten' something, "I, er. Should probably start calling you _Matthew_ or something?"

"Not necessarily," Eames says with a smile that reaches his eyes and Ariadne's stomach with the same force, "I answer to most things."

She's pretty sure she has an equally smart answer to this, but her hands get the better of her and grab for his face again, pulling him in off-balance to kiss him again; his lip splits again as she slams against it, and this time the blood from his mouth pools outward, over her lips, over her chin, blood and drool; it ought to be gross.

It isn't.

"Mmpf," Eames says, then, "mm," as they fall back into the door too hard, and he doesn't fling his arms up in time to stop his head from knocking into hers.

"Ow—"

"Sorry—"

" _Ahahaha_ — ow."

For a long, heart-thumping moment Ariadne listens to the corridor outside for sounds of an eavesdropping Bethany, and Eames remains where he fell, his forehead against hers and his legs splayed awkwardly to prevent either of them from slipping any further.

But there's nothing, no giggling, no audible breathing, no sign that the corridor is occupied at all, and when Eames says, "Maybe we should move …" she doesn't shush him.

"Uh-huh," Ariadne agrees, holding his shoulders while he gets his balance back. "Oops. Um."

"Which way is the –?" Eames begins, leaning on the wall and breathing out slowly.

"Are you going to say living room or _bedroom_?"

He grimaces. "Which do you want me to say? Because I was going to say _toilet_."

Ariadne covers her face with her hands and laughs again, somewhere between embarrassment and hysterics again. "Uh, it, just round that corner. Over the laundry bags. I'm sorry, we don't tidy much and –"

"My ceiling leaks," Eames reminds her, picking his way over the laundry bags and the textbooks and the ring binders, "and I live in a slum. So, when I get out of the toilet, where am I … where should I look for you?"

It's so skillfully done that for a moment she doesn't notice he's just knocked the ball back into her court without even a flicker; he's leaning around the corner, having clearly found the bathroom – it's hard to miss in an apartment this small – and smiling at her, _nervously_. It looks like nervousness.

"The –" the word gets stuck in Ariadne's throat and she shakes her head at herself in disbelief. "The bedroom, okay, my bedroom. It's the one that _doesn't_ smell like pot pourri."

Eames grins and sniffs the air. "Ah, so I should follow the scent of Febreze?"

She rolls her eyes. "I can still change my mind."

"You can," he agrees, holding her gaze for slightly too long, until something in his pleading expression makes her abdomen throb, "but please don't."

In her bedroom, Ariadne regards the room with horror. She looks – well, it makes her look like a grad student with an exhausting hobby who places study and exercise a lot higher on her priorities list than vacuuming or putting clothes away after taking them to the laundry room. There are piles of clothes breeding with other piles of clothes, none of which have actually gone into her closet. There are books on architecture and the odd second-hand sci-fi novel on every available surface – the room didn't come with bookshelves – and she's using a pile of books about Renaissance churches which she should have taken back to the college library last semester as a nightstand.

Her bed looks like stray dogs party in it. The blinds are still down. She has nothing on her walls but a poster advertising Mal de Mar's most famous fight and a Polaroid of her old dog. It's not exactly a boudoir.

"Oh fuck it," Ariadne says, kicking her shoes off. She shoves the sheets off the bed and onto the floor at the foot of it, hides her kit bag behind the open doors of the conspicuously empty closet (like the stench of Febreze won't lead anyone to look for it there in the first instance).

She throws her coat into the closet as an afterthought and makes a lunge for the only can of deodorant that's not in the bathroom; Ariadne is pretty sure she doesn't stink today but there's no – oh god she hasn't shaved _anything_ in weeks, months – and more to the point –

Eames knocks, he actually _knocks_ on the door just as she finishes firing horrible Axe Sport into her armpits, inside her top, at a distance which is far too close to her skin.

"I hope you have condoms," she says, wincing as he sidles into the room, "because I don't."

"Do I look like the kind of person who carries prophylactics around?" Eames asks, peering around as if he's in an art gallery. "This is … nice."

"No, it's a shithole."

"It's very you."

" _Asshole_."

"Also, I don't have any," Eames says, "but I do have a sudden urge to be generous with the remains of my money and the remains of my knees and maybe _run_ to the nearest – to the nearest store – well, walk briskly –"

"It's okay." Ariadne sighs and covers her face with her hands. "I haven't shaved anything in an eternity. You'd need a machete to find it."

When she peers out from between her fingers he's shrugging with one shoulder. His black eye shows up like a target in the dim room, and the rampant _something_ from earlier in the day stirs energetically inside her.

"And maybe I like that," Eames says, and he sounds – to her surprise – like he means it. Or at least there's that strange half-laugh and the throatiness is back in his voice and so what if her room looks the way it looks and so what if _she_ looks the way she looks –

Ariadne launches herself at him, catching him with his weight on the wrong, foot, and knocks him backward onto the bed; Eames bounces twice and lies flat on the untucked, unremarkable sheets. She can see all of his chins from this angle, the bits of longer stubble where he hasn't quite shaved perfectly, the degree to which his eye socket has puffed out with the bruise. She can see up his nose and she still wants – her cunt twitches in anticipation – really fucking _wants_ him.

"No condoms," she says, slightly despairingly, as he looks up at her from the flat of his back.

Eames points at his mouth, smirks, and gives her the cheesiest, most retarded thumbs-up ever, and she lunges to punch him in the chest almost automatically.

He makes an _oof_ sound, and Ariadne tips her head back and shouts at the ceiling, "WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH ME?" She's about to _get laid_ and she punches him in the chest? She hits him _again_ , after giving him a fucking concussion? Ariadne climbs onto the bed beside him and faceplants on his sternum. "Sorry."

He pats the back of her head very gently, and after a couple of strokes moves to rubbing the back of her neck with his thumb. It feels somewhere between good and annoying; she resists the urge to sink her teeth into his stomach, for now.

"And I might _also_ like that," Eames says, very quietly, "but, uh, first things first."

"What?" Ariadne reaches behind her head and grabs his hand, holding it still and away from her nape. She doesn't wait for an answer, mostly because she's not really sure what she wants to hear him say anyhow, lifting herself up to fiddle with the buttons on his shirt.

"You don't have to –"

"Shut up," Ariadne says, brushing a clump of hair behind her ear. She lets his hand fall, attacks the buttons with both hands, her hair immediately hanging in loose coils around her face, and in seconds she has the measure of him, from neck to navel.

He's a map of faded scars, terrible tattoos that blur at the edges, and body hair which seems to have no coherent idea of the direction it's growing in. She knew already, she's seen already, but under these circumstances it's new again, on a different plane, at an angle she's never encountered. Ariadne cups with one hand his left pec, where what was once muscle has sloughed off definition and become fat again, leaving him with a breast that's a little larger than hers, and digs her nails in without thinking.

Eames makes the same sound he'd made into her mouth in the restaurant; free of any muffling it sounds like the contented sigh of some large animal, almost a purr – and he pushes up, just a little, into her hand.

"Oh," Ariadne says, under her breath, and she slides onto his hips as if she's climbing onto an especially wide bicycle seat – it's not the most graceful or _erotic_ of mounts, but she can feel him against her, just a little hard (she hopes fervently that it's not actually his phone or his wallet or something ridiculous like that). She digs her nails in again, and smiles as he pushes up – pushes his whole torso, from crotch to collar – up against her.

"Just because mine are bigger," Eames says, a little breathlessly, a wobbly smile on his lips.

The slap is as knee-jerk as the punch was, but harder. Her palm connects with his face – the side with the black eye – and turns his face with the force. The _sound_ of it echoes off the walls of her room and around the inside of her skull, but the red mark and the heat on her hand are nothing to the effect it has on the rest of her.

Ariadne clasps her other hand over her mouth but the satisfied noise is already out there in the air between them; she's already ground down against Eames, her body circumventing her conscious brain in favor of finding its own route, and when she looks back to his face, to his black eye and red cheek and the way his mouth is hanging open in a dazed, damp smile, there's another twitch inside her.

His pupils are huge, and she can feel him getting harder.

"Alright?" Eames asks, when she doesn't move.

It's all that she can do to nod, her hand still on her mouth, and not rock on the spot. She can feel him – even if it wasn't obvious from the look on his face – the way he's, he's not lying about enjoying. At all. More than this, she can feel _herself_ ; she feels hot and heavy and swollen and _getting wet_ because she hit him in the face again.

"You can do it again if you want to," Eames says, and though the words are an offer the tone is a plea; he watches her so intently that she wants to jerk her hands up in front of her face until he can't see the expressions she's unable to stop herself from making.

Ariadne breathes slowly in and out, into her palm, and after a few cycles of trying to regain her sense of internal balance she realizes that she's been rolling her hips, grinding against him without thinking about it, and that _that_ does kind of explain why she's not calming down any.

"Okay?" Eames adds, and there's a definite note of pleading in his voice. There's also a rough, warm edge to it, like the words are getting stuck in something on their way out; he reaches for her, puts a hand on her thigh, just above the knee, holding her in place.

It's the left, the hand without the curled-up, crushed finger she imagined in the shower, and the memory of it makes her dizzy.

"Ariadne?"

She grabs at his hand, pulling it from her leg and, the angle of the stretch rubbing her clit against either his cock or his pubis, slams it back, back above his head, against the bed. Eames isn't an idiot; he bends his arm, misses smacking his knuckles on the wall and keeps her from reaching so far that she loses her seat, and later she'll grudgingly admire the calculation involved in that.

Right now, she holds his hand against the bed and kisses him with ferocity, and too much force; she's expecting the taste of blood, but still taken aback by the groan and the upward thrust that accompany it, still giddied by shoving down to meet him half-way. Her thighs squeeze his sides, her tongue circles his, and she swallows the next sound out of his mouth, clenching her hand on his wrist.

Somewhere in the mess of bent-back limbs, aggressive kisses, and strange unwieldy noises (his and hers) Ariadne remembers she is still fully-dressed down to the socks, and that while she may have no condoms she also has no intention of limiting herself to a bit of kissing and frottage.

"Hold –" Ariadne mutters, intending to pull away from his mouth but getting drawn back into another kiss at the last minute, "– wait up –"

She releases his wrist, scrabbling at the hem of her top as she tries to haul it over her head in one swift movement and instead catches some of the trim on her elbow; Ariadne twists, swears, and hears something rip. "Oh _fuck_."

"I can he–"

"GOT IT," Ariadne yelps, louder than she intended. "Stay right where you are."

"Whatever you say," Eames says in the same contented purr as before. "Whatever you say."

She's too distracted by wrestling her way out of her top – not distracted enough to actually check what the damage is, her sense of priorities isn't about to privilege the sartorial over the sexual, not today – to really understand what he's saying besides that.

This being what she'd thought at the outset was going to be a normal day, she doesn't have to fight against the argumentative metal hooks of one of the two bras she owns, the ones that exist to make it look like she has breasts at all, and she crashes back across him like a wave up the side of a beach.

His skin his hot, his mouth is hot, and as she claps her hand back into place around his wrist, holding his arm vulnerable and surrendering up above his injured head, his fingers dip to brush hers in a wholly affectionate gesture that nearly throws her off completely.

"Well at least you've definitely got _nipples_ ," Eames mutters against her mouth, as she draws back just enough to inhale.

"You want another _slap_?"

"Might do."

She bites his lower lip, right at the point of the split, and pulls; his hiss of pain is chased by a groan that rumbles somewhere in his chest. The rumble comes with an abrupt thrust upward from Eames and a kind of fluttering throb in her cunt, and Ariadne can't help answering it.

"Give me your hand," she says, the tail of the moan dragging across her vocal cords and pulling them down half an octave. "Your right."

Eames surrenders his right hand to her as simply as if he's giving up the keys to a car he's too drunk to drive, slipping it palm-up into her grip as she breathes, too hard, alongside his mouth.

She pulls it down between them, skating over her ribs, her breastbone, without stopping. It's only when she encounters the waistband of her pants that she realizes she's done this in the wrong order, and makes a frustrated noise at Eames's face, fumbling for the button fly and trying not to push herself against his hand still-clothed in her impatience.

"And to think I _liked_ those trousers on you," Eames says; it's supposed to be a joke, some compulsive humor of his, but he still sounds too hoarse, too breathy for it to really fly as nonchalance.

Ariadne's ears burn as she tries to hang onto his hand and unbutton her pants at the same time.

"Want me to help?"

She winces, catching her thumb in one of the button-holes, trapping it with the side of the button in a surprisingly painful pinch. "Um."

Eames twists his hand, leaving his crooked pinky hooked around her curved one, and with a deftness that does not surprise her for a second he flinches open the row of buttons, brushing the very tips of his fingers over the front of her panties before surrendering to her grip again.

"Practice?" she murmurs, when she has enough breath to.

"Punishing daily regime," Eames corrects, his lips not-quite-touching hers. "Terrible hardship, cry myself to sleep at night – you think you have it tough with all your running around and punching bags of sand – _mm_."

It's not clear whether it's her kiss that curtails his nonsense, or the fact that she drags his hand into her panties without a thought for whether _Cosmo_ would advise doing so on what is technically not even a first date, but Eames breaks off into an appreciative _mm_ right against her lips.

She bites too hard on his mouth as he tunnels his fingers through her pubic hair, searching with all the tenacity she'd forgotten he'd _need_ , and their whole delicately-balanced operation is disrupted as he humps involuntarily up in response. Ariadne clutches harder at his left wrist, still bent back against the bed.

When the tip of his finger slides past her clit, stops, and drifts back to rub with more certainty, Ariadne forgets herself and digs her nails into the back of his _right_ hand.

"No?" Eames asks, freezing in place, his mouth against her cheek, his finger close enough to touch but not actually _touching_ , and she can't help a grumble of impatience, a lean of the hips.

"No, _yes_ – argh –" Ariadne makes a frustrated noise and takes her hand out of her pants as carefully as she can. "Don't stop."

"Oh good," Eames mutters, and as she tries aimlessly to find somewhere to put her hand where a convulsive squeeze won't come across the wrong way, he runs his fingers the length of her labia.

"Fff–" Ariadne kisses him, messily and not wholly on the mouth, before any more _sound_ can escape her. She rests her free hand on his clavicle, hanging from it, her fingers stabbing at the dip in the centre as she unclenches and unclenches her left around his wrist, barely registering the occasional pressure of _those_ fingers on the back of her hand.

"Mm," Eames replies, and, his thumb on her clit, he ducks the tip of his finger inside her with a deeper, " _mm_ ," which she echoes, higher up the scale, trying to chase the rest of his finger with her body.

Ariadne strokes distractedly at the stubble on his throat, her mouth fastened to his as if she's growing from it, the taste of blood almost gone from his saliva. Eames slides two of his fingers inside her, and she presses against his hand so hard she can feel his bent knuckle leave an imprint in her ass.

She tightens her hand on his _neck_.

The sound he makes is _overall_ ecstatic in timbre, although superficially it sounds like a blocked toilet outflow. Ariadne decides to judge it as good on the basis that he's lifting his head to push his neck into her hand harder, and presses the side of her forefinger into his windpipe.

And after that there is a kind of rhythm they fall into. It's broken by times his thumb slips, slithers, and slides away from the best possible spot; moments when Ariadne squeezes his throat too hard and he twitches in sudden desperation; times when he pushes up against her too hard and she almost falls off him, but in the face of it all she begins to feel hot and heavy. Tense, and getting wetter and wetter. His thumb slides more easily, with less friction, and she drives her hips against his hand harder. And harder.

She freezes, her body tense as electric wire, still clenched around his fingers, her hips abruptly stalled in place. Only inertia carries her forward again to lean into his hand, and he doesn't take the oblique hint but instead almost _digs_ his thumb into her clit, too hard, and just hard enough that she almost chokes on her next breath.

Distracted by the white lines lancing past her closed eyes, by the shaking in her legs, the _unh_ that escapes her afterward may be unfortunately loud and very clear, but Ariadne has been past caring about it for a contented and very wet eternity.

"Oh god my wrist," Eames mutters, after an interval of forever and then some.

"Moan, moan," Ariadne murmurs, loosening her grip on his throat so that he doesn't sound so much like he's _dying_ any more. It's possibly not the best choice of words, and when Eames launches a truncated, hoarse giggling fit she joins in too. "Um," Ariadne adds, moving until he can retrieve his hand – which he does with a last, friendly pat to her squashed-flat pubic hair, "Sorry I…"

Eames smiles at her blankly for an uncomfortably long time before saying, "Sorry, I have _no_ idea what you think you're apologising for."

"Er," Ariadne sits up, painfully aware that he's still hard below her jelly legs, waiting for something she's already had. "Strangling you?" she says, too wobbly to tick anything off on her fingers, "Not letting you come?"

"Mm," Eames agrees, his hand resting limply on her thigh again, "but in a stroke of terribly good luck for us both –"

"Are you sure you don't want to –" Ariadne begins, but she loses the end of the sentence somewhere and makes do with an extremely vague gesture. Given the context, it's not hard for him to extrapolate, after all.

"Well," Eames says in an exaggeratedly posh accent, "I can always _nip off_ to the bathroom and deal with it, if you want."

"Or," Ariadne says, sliding off him and curling onto her side on the mattress, too syrupy and swamped to care what he might think of the suggestion or what it says about her that she's making it, "you can stay here, and let me watch."

To her surprise he leans to kiss her on the forehead and whispers what sounds like a heartfelt, " _Thank you_."

  


"No, no, no," Ariadne groans as her alarm clock bleats indignantly that she's not awake enough yet, and she shoves it off the pile of books serving as her nightstand and pulls the sheets over her head into a protective tent, on the grounds that if she can just prevent daylight from getting to her eyelids, it's not morning and she doesn't have to wake up.

The sheets smell, in equal parts, of Eames and of sex.

Ariadne deems holding them over her face and inhaling to be a little on the creepy side at this point, and after a moment of deliberately not breathing in through her nose she remembers why she's in bed on her own, feeling somewhat smugger in waking up than she has in a long while regardless.

It then occurs to her that rather than sleeping on the loveseat ("Athletic stars need sleep, and people sharing beds with me don't always succeed in that," Eames had assured her, blundering through the dark with his shoes in his hands, "and I doubt your couch is more uncomfortable than a bench."), there's a chance that, what with him being a man, there's a good chance Eames has just slunk out of the apartment while she sleeps, which is either going to make her match extremely awkward or extremely easy. This depends on whether or not he's just pulled on her what he apparently pulled on Arthur, and actually fled the _country_.

Ariadne lies with the sheets over her face, listening to the burp and burble of her muffled alarm-clock on the floor, and reminds herself that, temptation to remain in bed forever or not, she still has to train, and she still has to go to class. Preferably without either crying or biting anyone's head off during either.

She rolls out of bed and selects the least-bad-smelling t-shirt from the floor for the walk to the kitchen, just in case Bethany is back already and didn't really want to see her tits this morning. Ariadne's sure she _intended_ to go into the kitchen and ferret out the remaining Powerbars but somehow she finds herself in the living room, staring at where the poster for her match is slowly curling off the wall, minus a top corner thumbtack.

Eames is snoring quietly on the loveseat, fully-dressed, his legs extended in front of him and his arms folded over his chest, his chin on his collar. He looks like a passenger for a delayed flight, and his shoes are off, resting on either side of his feet. He's been a little less tidy than Saito, and a couple of textbooks that were on the arms of the seat have now been absorbed into the chaos of the floor.

It takes a minute, because the folds in his neck as he sleeps are fascinating and the low, undulating rumble coming from his nose sounds like trains passing underfoot, but the little orange pot of pills is missing from the melee of notes, books, and not-yet-cleared cereal bowls. She's no way of knowing if this is down to Eames or down to Bethany – or, Ariadne guesses with an unpleasant sinking feeling in her stomach, if it's down to Saito – but at least Eames is still here.

What that _means_ is something she's not even going to think about until she's had some breakfast.

  


Classes are not cancelled for the day of her match.

Ariadne knows, rationally, that there is no reason why they should be, since it's a Friday and she has Neo-Classical Ecclesiastical all afternoon whether she's fighting or not, but in her mind they've been brushed aside in favor of concentrating as keenly as she can on every single video she's seen of Catriona Florentina's fighting technique. And she's willing to admit, if only to herself, that part of her fervor is down to wanting to avoid thinking about anything else.

Even so, she feels a kind of sinking sensation in her stomach when she gets to campus and looks to the room her Neo-Classical Ecclesiastical lecture is being held in. Jesus, three hours of Dr Stimson bleating about various churches of St John's in London, England, and all the while she could be – and should be – training.

It is a beautiful day, there's no denying it; the sun overhead giving everything an unnaturally warm cast and once again not even a shady hint of a cloud in the sky, just bright, clear blue scarred and crisscrossed with the vapor trails of airplanes. There are flowers bravely blooming in some of the better-maintained flowerbeds around the campus, and the wind is restricting itself to gusts rather than trying to strip the skin from anyone's body.

And tonight she has to fight. Fight. Concentrate on the fighting, and not on all the bullshit that surrounds it – the book-makers, the people with an unhealthy fixation on thumbs, the warnings, the drama can all fade away and leave her to punch Catriona Florentina in _peace_.

There's no small degree of irony to the fact that this is what's running through her head when she walks into the lecture theatre early and finds Cobb sitting alone amid the empty seats.

"Okay, listen," Ariadne says, before he can open his mouth, going on the offense – it's not her style, not in the ring, where she's all counter-puncher, as slippery and agile as Florentina seems to be boxer-puncher – and getting her hit in first. "Come to the match tonight. I know you know where it is."

"I do," Cobb agrees. He looks strange out of his coat, no less intense and intently-staring, but shrunken, somehow, his knitted blue sweater the same shade as the seat upholstery so that he almost fades into the lecture hall like a ghost.

"So you can see for yourself if things start going badly. You can _stop the match_ if you think it's necessary, I swear," Ariadne spreads her hands; her bag slides off her shoulder and thumps into the dip of her elbow, dragging her a little off-balance and spoiling the dramatic gesture somewhat. "Just don't try to stop it before it begins, let me have my fight, and stop following me around telling me how _awful_ it is that I'm doing this."

"Okay," Cobb says, with something which wouldn't have been a smile on someone else, but on a face as apparently permanently sad as his seems like it might almost be one, "but you do know that I'm here because I'm covering for Dr Stimson today, not because I wanted to talk you out of your match." He locks his fingers around each other, leans forward in the seat and rests his forearms on the back of the seat in front of him. "A mutual friend asked me to stop bugging you about it, and since I respect his wishes, I am going to stop bugging you about it. I will, however, bug you relentlessly about that overdue paper on Burke's influence on the anti-Rococo movement –"

Ordinarily Ariadne would have at least attempted a lame excuse in the face of the paper she's pretty sure she's actually written but just failed to hand in for so long that her apartment has swallowed it entirely, but the bigger question escapes her lips: "Mutual friend?"

"Arthur."

"Oh." Ariadne lowers her arms until her bag touches the floor. "You know Dr Stimson normally has a TA cover for her."

Cobb shrugs. "Some professors actually enjoy teaching."

"Really?" Ariadne stares at him for a long interval, trying to imagine Arthur having friends, trying to imagine Cobb having friends – trying hard _not_ to imagine anything Eames has said about the two of them, in case the mental image sticks with her for the rest of the class. 'Mutual friend' seems platonic enough, and it's not as if Eames isn't prone to just making things up for the hell of it.

He shrugs again, a little more expansively. "There was also an element of wanting to assure you that I have no intention of sabotage, or any more … pestering. I promise."

Ariadne sags and sits down in the front row, her back to him. "A lot of people have been making me a lot of promises I don't especially trust, recently."

"I'm told you have an extremely explosive rear hook," Cobb says, and he sounds, for a moment, almost amused. She doesn't turn to check his expression. "And if I renege on my word, you are completely welcome to employ it on me. I'll even sign a waiver."

"Okay, okay." Ariadne rubs the back of her neck. "About the Burke paper –"

"Email it to me. Unlike Dr Stimson," Cobb says, passing by her seat on the way to the lectern as a couple of other students filter into the theatre, "I am aware that I _have_ a college email account."

  


Three hours later, dizzy with the stuffiness of the room, the stupidity of some of her classmates, and non-stop slides of European Neo-classical churches and all their brutal, vile geometry, Ariadne inhales the post-sunset air outside the lecture theatre and nearly chokes on the dust of the city.

She wends her way between the buildings, already mapping her route to Mott & Barley's as the wind batters her ponytail against her neck. At least she doesn't have to carry her kit bag, for once; Arthur and Eames even refrained from squabbling when Arthur offered to take it down there for her. A miracle, or possibly just the afterglow – she can't really tell.

Ariadne half-bounces down the three steps to the parking lot, the few spaces delineating in flaking yellow paint, and tries not to grin too madly at the thought of _afterglow_ , at the memories. There's a car waiting in the lot, apparently not for a space but just idling between two rows, a discretely-expensive black car with clear windows that could be anyone's.

It's not _anyone's_ , and she knows even before the rear window slides effortlessly down.

"Ms Shaw," Saito says, opening the door. "Would you care for a ride?"

"Shockingly _no_ ," Ariadne says, shouldering her bag and glaring at him through the gap he's created in his no doubt bulletproof shell. "I think I'd rather walk."

"It has occurred to me," Saito says, not moving, and apparently unoffended by her refusal (although how she would _tell_ is not something Ariadne chooses to dwell on), "that I have allowed you to believe something, falsely, because I thought it might benefit me for you to believe this." He inclines his head in what she assumes is an expression of regret. "It has been preying on my conscience."

Ariadne somewhat doubts this.

"If this is an oblique way of saying your promise doesn't hold water, you can go fuck yourself," she says, simply. "I've had enough of this bullshit."

"On the contrary," Saito says, still holding the door open. "I am a man of my word. You and yours will not be harmed; my niece would never forgive me. My conscience rebels, however, at the implication that you would ever have been under any threat."

"Sure."

"Perhaps we can leave the parking lot?"

"How about no?"

He nods, slowly. "I must make clear to you; whatever you have been told, I have never enacted violence against any of your associates," Saito says. The wind blasts Ariadne in the side of the face, but she remains steadfast. "I cannot account for Robert Fischer's actions, but I have never undertaken or asked to be undertaken any damage upon the person of your manager."

Wind swirls around Ariadne's ankles. Inside the car probably has a careful temperature control and GPS and comfortable seats, unlike the lecture theatre with its butt-devouring chairs, but there's no way she wants to get back into an enclosed space with this man again. And definitely not one he's in control of.

"But you let me think that you had because —?" Ariadne asks, almost too quietly.

"I assume for the same reason that Mr Eames has allowed you to think that I am responsible for his injuries; the idea that, were you afraid of me, you might be more malleable. More biddable. More inclined to accept, say, the possibility of ingesting performance-enhancing medication on my behalf." Saito nods again, as if he's listening to a piece of particularly well-performed music. "And since our last conversation it has been … stridently represented to me that I was, I believe 'a total douchebag' to do so."

 _Bethany_ , Ariadne thinks, but she just clenches her jaw and glares at him, tucked away in the warm, sheltered shell of his car.

"And I suppose you have an explanation for why Eames would have _lied to me_ about that?" she says, waiting for him to fuck up. Wanting him to fuck up, if she's honest. The warm of his body beneath her is like an anchor in her memory; Eames, asleep on the loveseat, his neck folds and chin scar, Eames and his ridiculous solid hair and his rough fingers and his soft mouth. She'd far rather Saito were lying.

"No," Saito admits, "I doubt anyone has any explanation for any thing Mr Eames says or does; I am led to believe he is quite secretive."

She's just about to open her mouth to contradict him when he interrupts her.

"However, I can only assume that his motivation is similar to mine; a woman alarmed by the possibility of physical violence against herself or friends is easier to manipulate." Saito nods one last time. "Are you quite sure you wouldn't appreciate a ride to the venue?"

" _Yes_ ," Ariadne snaps, pushing two loose strands of hair behind her ear. "I'm quite, quite sure."

"Then all that remains is to wish you luck, Ms Shaw, both in this fight and in your future endeavors." He closes the door, and a moment later the car pulls out of the parking lot with barely a purr of the engine.

  


"Remember, she's a little slow off the mark and while her offense is strong, she's got a tendency to drop her guard lower than it needs to be when she's looking for a shot," Arthur says, as Ariadne binds her hands in quick, short strokes.

"I know," Ariadne sighs, trying not to snap at him. He's nervous – she can _see_ it, even if he's doing a good job of hiding it – and trying, in typical Arthur fashion, to advise them both into submission. It's probably not helping his mood having Eames hang around in the doorway to what apparently usually serves as a "private room" (it has a dance pole and a podium in it, and the walls are dark red velour with stains she doesn't want to examine too closely), and it's not helping hers much either.

How the hell do you get a straight answer out of Eames, anyhow?

"Don't forget to protect your head," Arthur says, and stops.

"Advice from Cobb, too?" Ariadne sighs, checking the bindings on her right as he checks the bindings on her left. "I thought he promised not to nag me all the way around New York any more?"

"He promised, I didn't," Arthur says, abrupt as ever, as he switches to checking the binding on her right.

"Oh you back-stabbing asshole," Ariadne says without rancor. "When I am done knocking her out I'm gunning for _you_."

They fall into silence – Eames has yet to say a word, and she wonders if he _knows_ what Saito's told her – as Arthur laces her gloves on and tests each one for looseness. Ariadne resists the urge to turn, to look at Eames and see what the hell he's doing. There is no point. In ten minutes, five minutes, she'll be in the ring.

Eames can wait. Her papers can wait. Saito and Fischer and Cobb and brain damage and Bethany and Ethan and her pit of a room can wait. Everything can wait until she's finished this; go big or go home. Etc., etc.

 _She's going to fucking kill him._

Ariadne's not entirely sure if she means Saito or Eames right now. Maybe both. _Someone_ needs a punch in the face, and if Catriona doesn't manage to knock her down for the count then someone besides her opponent is going to _get one_.

The adrenaline probably has a hand in this decision, but she couldn't care less. Ariadne jumps up and down on the spot, feeling the distribution of her weight in her shoes, the way the soles bend beneath her. Like the last few hundred tests she's done on them, they move in a way that lets her take incredibly fast side-steps, and she hopes it will be enough.

"SHAW!" comes echoing down to the room, and even though she hears it just fine Eames runs his palm over the crest of his stupid Ken-doll hair and catches her eye.

 _Fuck you_ , Ariadne doesn't shout, _what the hell were you doing?_

"Time," Eames says, with a tense smile. "Good luck, Ms Shaw."

 _Fuck you,_ Ariadne repeats internally. "Don't need luck," she says, aloud.

"It wouldn't hurt," Arthur says primly, following her out of the door.

The corridors of the building are narrow and winding; it's a nightclub, not a sports arena, and it's not even a reputable nightclub. People have died here, and not just in the ring, but it hardly penetrates through the jittering of pre-fight endorphins.

Ariadne looks at Eames's back as he leads the way. Alright, maybe they'll _talk_ about it, later. Maybe. Maybe she won't punch him in the face and ask questions later.

Maybe _Saito_ 's lying.

They take a corner and Eames starts down a flight of stairs toward the basement ring; who do you trust? The habitual liar who's spent a year of his life as your friend, or the criminal businessman you hardly know whose word is apparently his bond or whatever the saying is?

 _Fight_.

Ariadne shakes her head, stretches her neck from side-to-side. It can all wait.

Eames pushes open the door to the main basement room. There are people sitting in chairs whom she doesn't look too closely at, but she recognizes, on the opposite side of the ring, Bethany and Saito sitting next to each other, and Ethan on the other side of Bethany, looking bored and fidgety with his arm in its sling.

Later, later.

There's no sign of Catriona yet – Ariadne imagines she must be making her way down the stairs after them, after her announcement, after her manager, in front of her coach. The ring is by no means up to professional standards, even up to the standards of her old high-school ring, her college ring. But it's a ring. There are ropes. There is a referee. There are people waiting to watch her.

Ariadne turns her head so she doesn't have to catch Saito's eye, and pats Arthur and Eames on the arms in turn with her glove, a friendly, soft punch. Yusuf nods to her from his spot behind her seat.

The world is shrinking down: from New York, to this building, to this room, to the ring, to the space between her fist and Catriona's body. Time will be measured in bells and nothing else; time is shrinking. It's like being lost in a kiss, in the moment when she comes; there's only now, this place.

She ducks under the rope, straightens up in her corner, and presses her gloves together with Arthur, Eames, and Yusuf arranged in a fan on the floor below her, as they all wait for the match to start.

[/END]

[Art Master post](http://community.livejournal.com/snakewife/550.html), [Soundtrack](http://community.livejournal.com/snakewife/493.html)


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